Carrot sales difficulties come to the fore, traditional planting model takes a hit
“What to do, what to do?” Impoverished household Zhong Wei scratched his head as he looked at the carrots piled up in his cellar. When the reporter went down into the cellar, they saw that many of the tens of thousands of kilograms of carrots had begun to sprout, and if they could not be sold soon they would have to be thrown away.
Xinnong Village, Yinjia Township, Shenbei New District, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province is a widely known “Number One Carrot Village”, and is now famous online as the “Number One Hard-to-Sell Carrot Village”. Nearly 20,000 tons of carrots lie quietly in cellars with few buyers.
Online distress calls! Relevant departments in Shenbei New District helped villagers busy themselves posting purchase requests online, and launched a “Love Group Buy” campaign through WeChat and other means. Liaoning's service industry authorities also activated a response mechanism and actively organized large and medium-sized agricultural product circulation enterprises within the province to go to the site to purchase carrots. Tong Jiawen, Party branch secretary of Xinnong Village, said: “We didn't expect Shenyang people to be so warm-hearted. Supermarkets and canteens of various work units have come one after another for ‘love purchases’, and since March more than 2 million kilograms have been sold.”
During interviews, the reporter learned that the “sales difficulties” of the “Number One Carrot Village” have not appeared for the first time; similar situations occurred in 2007 and 2012, only this year the problem is more prominent. Can relying only on “showing love” provide a long-term solution?
Right in Xinnong Village, villager Duan Liquan was doing the business of giving out-of-town carrots a “beauty treatment” and cold storage. He said: “Every cartload here is loaded with fresh carrots sent from Fujian. Their carrots are neat and clean one by one, and can sell for 3 yuan per kilogram at the wholesale market, but our village's carrots cannot move even at 0.3 yuan per kilogram. I once served as a sales agent for our village and know that our village's carrots are tasty and nutritious, but unfortunately they look poor, and in earlier years villagers' short-sighted practice of ‘when radishes sell fast, don't wash off the mud’ hurt the agents.” He Lixing, president of the Shenyang Vegetable Circulation Association, confirmed this view. He believes that the frequent occurrence in the past two years of “difficulty selling cabbage, difficulty selling radishes” is all related to the inertia of farmers' traditional planting: not looking at market changes, not asking about sales channels, and not being good at product upgrading, and therefore unable to withstand climate disasters and price cycle fluctuations.
Tong Xixin, a major carrot grower, also hopes for change. In his family's 5 large cellars, each over a zhang in length and width, 200,000 kilograms of carrots were piled up like a mountain, and not a single one had been sold. Because the village said that if anyone came for “love purchase”, impoverished households should be allowed to sell first. Tong Xixin did the math: land rent is 1,000 yuan per mu, plus carrot seeds, labor costs and other expenses, the cost is about 2,500 yuan, and with last year's drought reducing carrot output, the cost price of each kilogram of carrots was 0.8 yuan. “Now basically I'll sell for whatever they give!” Tong Xixin was burning with anxiety. He said that this year he could not plant this way again. If only contract farming could be developed, he would be willing to spend more on organic fertilizer to ensure the quality of the carrots and sell them at a good price.
Tong Xixin and Zhang Wenguo, deputy head of the Shenbei New District government, were thinking along the same lines. Zhang Wenguo believes that mobilizing all sectors to “show love” can provide emergency relief, but to fundamentally solve “sales difficulties”, it is still necessary to rely on adjusting the planting structure. Shenbei New District is a nationally famous deep-processing base for agricultural products, and guiding farmers to connect with the agricultural product deep-processing industry chain has geographical advantages. The government cannot interfere with the market, but it can help farmers solve the problem of information asymmetry, build a bridge for communication between production and sales, and guide farmers to upgrade their planting structure.