Why do farmers ultimately all choose to grow medicinal herbs?
In recent years, Handan County in Hebei Province has started from renewing concepts, broken free from the constraints of traditional agriculture, and supported and guided villages and towns to develop specialty industries such as Chinese medicinal herb cultivation. By strengthening specialties, bolstering leading enterprises, and creating brands, it has blazed new paths for increasing farmers' incomes.
Discovery——income per mu of medicinal herbs reaches 6000 yuan
In earlier years, farmers in Nanwenzhuang Village, Hesha Town, Handan County relied mainly on growing fruit trees for their main economic income in addition to field crops. But as the competitiveness of the fruit market declined, fruit tree cultivation gradually lost its advantage, and the path to increasing farmers' incomes grew narrower and narrower.
⟦NL> By a chance opportunity, villager Zhang Yunran obtained a piece of information: growing the Chinese medicinal herb Rehmannia (dihuang) was very profitable. He bought seeds from Shanxi and planted 3.5 mu of Rehmannia, earning more than 20,000 yuan that very year. He did the math for the reporter: “Growing wheat and corn, one mu of land earns only about 2000 yuan a year, and that's not even counting costs, while Rehmannia yields as much as over 3000 kg per mu. At 2 yuan per kg, the income per mu reaches 6000 yuan, which is 3 times that of growing wheat and corn.” In 2014, he contracted several more plots of land, expanding his Rehmannia planting area to 23 mu, becoming at a stroke a specialty grower famous in Nanwenzhuang Village and surrounding villages.
Exploration——from watching to building “one village, one product”
According to Zhang Santao, Party branch secretary of Nanwenzhuang Village, most of the village's farmland is yellow sandy soil, very suitable for growing Rehmannia. In the 1980s, Nanwenzhuang Village had a history of growing Rehmannia, but due to small scale, immature technology, and other reasons, it never developed. Zhang Yunran's success turned the villagers from onlookers into the main force of Rehmannia cultivation.
Facing more and more scattered growers, the county guided them according to the situation, implemented “one village, one product,” sought development through specialty, created markets through brands, and relied on services as support, continuously improving the quality, standardization, and market competitiveness of Rehmannia cultivation, and cultivating its own Chinese medicinal herb brand.
As Nanwenzhuang's Rehmannia cultivation strode toward modern agriculture, the villagers' lives also underwent earth-shaking changes. Since the beginning of this year, the village's Rehmannia growers have increased to more than 60 households, with a planting area of nearly 200 mu, increasing farmers' incomes by more than 1.3 million yuan.
Gazing at the expanse of Chinese medicinal herb bases, Zhang Santao said: “The whole village currently has more than 4000 mu of farmland. Through several years of effort, we will expand the planting scale, create our own brand, build our village into a ‘Rehmannia specialty village,’ and drive villagers from surrounding villages to join the ranks of cultivation, so that our medicinal herbs sell throughout the country.”
Promotion——large households leading small households to build a scaled industry
“In recent years the price of Rehmannia has been very good, and we all just sit and wait for buyers to come to our door. What we plant is medicinal herbs, but what we dig up is wealth.” said farmer Zhang Zhaoshan.
Zhang Zhaoshan is a major local Rehmannia grower. Since 2012, he has led local farmers to grow Rehmannia together. He planted 20 mu in total, and after deducting costs for seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and so on, his net income can reach more than 80,000 yuan a year. There are more than ten major growers like Zhang Zhaoshan in Nanwenzhuang Village. They not only became rich by growing Rehmannia themselves, but also led villagers to cultivate collectively, increasing the incomes of the masses.
Villager Zhang Jiming, 60 years old this year, saw that Zhang Zhaoshan, Zhang Yunran, and others had embarked on the road to wealth by growing Rehmannia, so he ran to the fields every day to observe and learn, asking about cultivation and management methods.
As the number of households growing Rehmannia gradually increased, the drawbacks of scattered cultivation, such as small scale, low technical content, and low degree of marketization, became increasingly prominent. To this end, the local authorities guided them according to the situation, increased policy and funding support, took major growers as leaders, adopted operating models such as capable people leading, small households cooperating, market guidance, and base support, strengthened the construction of planting garden bases, and gradually led the masses from scattered small-scale planting to concentrated contiguous planting, from individual planting to scaled transformation, and from extensive field management to standardized refined management.