The Rise of China's Internet Farmers Is Rewriting the Agricultural Development Landscape
In the surging tide of "Internet Plus" sweeping across rural China, a new group is rapidly taking shape——"Internet farmers." They come from different backgrounds and have different educational levels; among them are IT elites earning hundreds of thousands of yuan a year, executives of state-owned and foreign enterprises, and college student entrepreneurs, as well as genuine farmers.
Despite their different experiences, they share a similar profile.
⟦NL> ——They are the wave-riders of the Internet tide. A young man born in the 1990s in Xiushan County, Chongqing, sold 2 million free-range eggs in a single year.
——They are the new creators of rural wealth myths. During this year's Dragon Boat Festival, Suichang County in Zhejiang sold hundreds of thousands of "everlasting affection zongzi" online, actually selling out all the glutinous rice in the entire county.
——They are growing at geometric speed. At the beginning of last year, Xiushan County, located deep in the Wuling Mountain area, did not have a single e-commerce outlet; today that number has soared to 178, and by the end of this year it will achieve full coverage of 267 administrative villages, and by the end of next year it will expand to 71 surrounding counties and cities.
Experts believe that "Internet farmers" are becoming a vital force in leading a new generation of farmers, developing a new countryside, and lifting up a new agriculture.
A million "Internet farmers" nurture a trillion-yuan market
Recently, in Dengyang Village, Pingkai Town, Xiushan County, Chongqing, 40-year-old farmer Chen Tianyou walked into the e-commerce service outlet "Wuling Life Hall," marked by blue characters on a white background beside the villagers' activity room, lifted the floral-print cloth covering his bamboo basket for rain protection, and handed more than 30 free-range eggs to the "hall owner" Yang Jun. These fresh free-range eggs, following the e-commerce service outlets and logistics system spread across rural Xiushan, converge on the county seat and then travel by express delivery to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other major cities thousands of miles away. Today, more than half of the farmers in Xiushan sell their free-range eggs this way, and each egg fetches at least 2 yuan more.
Cao Xibin, 24 years old this year, has a scholarly air about him. He was formerly an investment manager at a fund company in Chongqing, earning hundreds of thousands of yuan a year. In April last year, Cao Xibin and two friends came to Xiushan and founded the e-commerce platform "Jiangge Network." In one year, he sold 2 million Xiushan free-range eggs across the country and thereby obtained several million yuan in angel investment. "What the Internet lacks now is just a free-range egg," this is a catchphrase Cao Xibin often repeats; the "free-range egg" refers to agricultural products.
Qingyuan in Guangdong produces about 50 million "Qingyuan chickens," a specialty agricultural product, each year. Last year on "Double Eleven," with the packaging and promotion of the Qingyuan municipal government and Alibaba, on the Tmall platform, "Qingyuan chickens" with e-commerce wings achieved sales of 10 million in a single day. This perfect answer sheet made many people sigh that a traditional farmer working himself to death for 3 months of sales is not as good as one day of hawking by an "Internet farmer."
Thousands upon thousands of such "Internet farmers" have already formed a huge new group. Data from the Alibaba Research Institute shows that currently there are already more than 1.6 million rural online stores registered on the Taobao and Tmall platforms alone, and last year national rural e-commerce sales exceeded 140 billion yuan. Xu Yuming, director of the Urban Development Research Institute of the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences, said that although it has begun to take shape, relative to China's 14 trillion yuan in annual e-commerce sales, rural e-commerce is still a blue ocean waiting to be developed, and in the future it will certainly overtake urban e-commerce and become another trillion-yuan market.
Whether in Chongqing in the west or in Anhui and Zhejiang in the central and eastern regions, the stories of "Internet farmers" are stunning, inspiring, and endlessly creative, making people gasp in admiration. Not only that, in some regions and industries, "Internet farmers" have already become the "main force" in the production and sale of agricultural products.
In the mountainous area of southern Zhejiang more than 1,000 kilometers from Xiushan County, Suichang County, where agricultural products often went unsold just a few years ago, now about 1/3 of the county's agricultural products are sold through the Internet. During this year's Dragon Boat Festival, the Suichang County Online Store Association organized a unified online marketing campaign to sell Suichang's specialty free-range pork long zongzi. Lin Songwen, vice president of the association, said that the online store association specifically sought out rural farming households, selected ingredients to wrap the zongzi, and integrated the cultural meaning of "everlasting affection and loyalty" into the marketing campaign for Suichang long zongzi. During the festival, they sold hundreds of thousands of "everlasting affection zongzi," using up all the glutinous rice in the county.
In some other industries, equally wonderful stories are also unfolding. The 71 counties and cities in the Wuling Mountain area where Xiushan County is located are one of China's important production areas for Chinese medicinal herbs. Previously, Chinese medicinal herbs in the region passed through layers of middlemen, making it hard for ordinary herb farmers to prosper. In 2013, the Chinese Medicinal Materials World Network settled in Xiushan, and most Chinese medicinal herbs in the county achieved direct transactions between farmers and merchants on this e-commerce platform, with sales revenue of more than 30 million yuan last year. Today, Xiushan County has become a source for publishing information such as market prices and circulation volumes of honeysuckle and other Chinese medicinal herbs, and has grasped market pricing power and the power to formulate industry quality standards.