New farmers show diverse entrepreneurial flair, mastering agricultural innovation in both rustic and modern ways

Contestant Zhang Xu had just shown off his “treasure”, and it immediately drew everyone's attention. He took out a sizable lingzhi mushroom and began introducing his roommate to some basic facts about fungi.

Zhang Xu's home is in Jalaid Banner, Hinggan League, Inner Mongolia. Because his family was not well off, he went out to work at the age of 16. “I started out as a waiter carrying plates, and in the end I became a hotel supervisor.”

By that time, his salary had already reached about 10,000 yuan a month. By that income standard, in his hometown he counted as a promising young man, but deep down, his pursuit of life went far beyond that. By chance, he learned that many people were growing mushrooms, and he instinctively felt that this industry had great prospects. In 2013, he quit his job and went to Henan specifically to learn the trade from a master.

In 2014, Zhang Xu had mastered the growing techniques and returned to his hometown to start a business. He said: “We have very abundant resources of straw and rice straw here, but farmers just burn them. Growing fungi requires 5 tons of straw per mu, which turns waste into treasure.”

Through a cooperative approach, he grew 100 mu of fungi together with local farmers. At present he already has several bases and has also helped 16 university students find employment together. Although he has not been growing for long, he estimates that this year he can earn about 400,000 yuan. “Next year's chestnut mushrooms have already been pre-ordered, 300 tons of them!” He is very satisfied with his achievements this year.

Sirigeleng, deputy director of the Youth Work, Workers, Peasants and Herdsmen Department of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Committee of the Communist Youth League, introduced that Zhang Xu's project was selected from 1,681 projects across 12 leagues and cities in the region, won first prize in the modern agriculture and animal husbandry group, and gained the qualification to advance to the national competition.

The “Postal Savings Bank Cup” 2015 China Youth Agriculture-Related Industry Entrepreneurship and Wealth Creation Competition was co-hosted by the Communist Youth League Central Committee, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Postal Savings Bank of China, and the Jiangsu Provincial People's Government. According to the competition arrangements, regional competitions across the country have now been completed one after another, and 150 outstanding projects will be divided into an creativity group, a start-up entrepreneurship group, and a growth entrepreneurship group (50 in each group) to take part in the national competition. Among them, the top 10 projects entering the growth group finals will compete for the championship through televised contests.

Fashionable entrepreneurship——using internet thinking to change traditional business models

“I'm the joke writer for the Zhejiang team, in charge of being funny.” Gu Ning is a typical “instantly familiar” person, not at all shy in front of strangers and talking freely. He is a Beijinger who grew up in Zhoushan, a top student who graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, and could be described as an atypical “science and engineering guy”.

“Like many university students, I stayed in Beijing after graduation.” he said. Born in 1983, he worked as a programmer and was also a hacker for a period of time. After working in Beijing for seven or eight years, he felt that his life should change.

Why did he change from an office worker into a new farmer?

In Gu Ning's own words, between the ages of 3 and 18, the best times of his life were spent in Zhoushan, and his taste memory is also the taste of Zhoushan. “But in Beijing, many hairtail fish on the market are sold under the name of Zhoushan hairtail, and in fact most of them are not local to Zhoushan. Many friends from Zhoushan cannot eat authentic Zhoushan seafood in Beijing.”

“I have already married in Beijing, and after my parents retired they also came to live in Beijing.” he said, but in order to start a business, he still quit his job and returned to Zhoushan.

Last year, Gu Ning founded the company “Zhoushan Mi Dao”, which is a homophone in the Zhoushan dialect for “Zhoushan taste”, with the slogan “the taste exclusively of 30 degrees north latitude”. For this, he obtained 5 million yuan in angel investment. His Zhoushan seafood products are sold on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.com and WeChat.

“We are different from others. For example, Zhoushan swimming crabs are very good, but if mailed in the usual way they can only survive five or six hours.” he said. “By improving our packaging technology, we can keep swimming crabs alive for 24 to 30 hours without a problem.”

As fresh products, they are very sensitive to the delivery speed of courier companies. Some time ago it snowed heavily in Beijing, and because of courier delays, many customers found that even the ice packs had melted when they received their goods, and quite a few items had spoiled. Although it was the courier's fault, he still decisively refunded the customers. For this alone, he lost nearly 30,000 yuan, and more than 100 orders were affected.

“Courier services constrain the development of agricultural e-commerce.” He feels somewhat helpless about this. He said that he often clashes with courier companies because of delays, but has no choice but to work with them. In order to change the logistics problem, he chose to set up shop on JD.com and plans to cooperate with that company's logistics arm, trying to solve the bottleneck caused by courier services.

Gu Ning keenly noticed new changes in agriculture-related e-commerce. He introduced: “Last year we relied relatively heavily on the Alibaba ecosystem and sold a lot on Taobao. This year we plan to diversify our operations, and we are also cooperating with other food platforms, striving to achieve precision sales.”

In Gu Ning's view, “internet ” entrepreneurship in agriculture-related industries is no longer simply about moving offline things online to sell. Once that happens, operations can only be limited to a single product, and the added value will not be very high.

“From offline to online, what matters more is reflecting internet thinking, which in my understanding means letting the user experience upgrade along with it.” he said. In the express packages he sends out, under the courier waybill there is a crab claw-shaped keychain, which can be used both to open the box and to open a beer. Imperceptibly, it conveys the company culture to consumers. In addition, after customers buy seafood, he includes small cards in the box on how to prepare seafood, telling consumers how to make fish with a Zhoushan taste.

“There is a trend in packaging now. It is not about how luxurious the packaging is, but about making customers feel it is refined and placing greater emphasis on user experience.” Gu Ning believes that, unlike traditional packaging, his packaging is not simply the outer layer of wrapping.

Besides persisting in selling local Zhoushan seafood, Gu Ning is also thinking about how to use deep internet technology to change the traditional business model. He recently had an idea to make products traceable by scanning a QR code, so that consumers can understand the entire seafood production chain more intuitively.

He also recently plans to contact other internet companies and consider whether a positioning system can be installed directly on fishing boats and linked to a mobile phone app. Through the internet, it would directly show the fishing boat's operating location and the amount of fish caught. He is thinking that while the fishing boat is returning to port, people could start ordering these fish on the internet, so that customers can eat the freshest seafood as soon as possible, and too many sales links can also be cut out.

Of course, Gu Ning is very clear that a “good gimmick” alone is not enough. Recently, he launched fish essence and fish soy sauce, which are condiments unique to the local area. He said: “Local traditional enterprises are not good at promoting their products. Through cooperation, we bring good products to the market.”

“We do not want to be just a peddler on the internet, but to build an internet seafood brand.” That is how he positions his own entrepreneurship.

⟧ “Rustic methods” entrepreneurship——reshaping production relations to start a business again

Unlike the other contestants, at first glance the two contestants from Shanxi, Qin Xiaowei and Gong Bo, look somewhat “rustic”. The project they brought this time is “Xingyuan Agricultural Pure Juice Processing and Sales”.

Qin Xiaowei, 26 this year, graduated in journalism from a university in Beijing. After graduating from university, he chose to work at a decent advertising company in Beijing. “After working for less than a year, I felt that drifting in Beijing gave me no sense of security.” He chose to return to his hometown to start a business.

Qin Xiaowei was quite bold. After returning to his hometown, he immediately opened an advertising company with a friend and it soon became profitable. But less than half a year later, he still decided to withdraw from the company, the reason being that he and his partner did not get along in their business philosophy.

Afterward, he keenly discovered that selling sugar-roasted chestnuts was very profitable. He opened several chestnut shops in his hometown. From starting the business to now, in less than two months, he sold nearly 10 tons of chestnuts, and basically recovered his costs.