What price should "cabbage price" really be? How can cabbage transform and upgrade?

Editor's note: As the cold winter sets in, Chinese cabbages flood the market, and once again we hit the strange cycle of “too much or too little”: when prices are high everyone plants, and when there is too much the price plunges, leaving large volumes unsold and growers anxious. The reason behind it is not complicated: the market is determined by supply and demand. The Chinese cabbage that was once the “staple vegetable” on people's dinner tables is no longer the “lead actor” today. How should cabbage be grown? Where should growers go from here? Our reporter went to Tangwang town in Jinan, the “hometown of Chinese cabbage”, to explore the transformation strategy that turns the “staple vegetable” into a “four-season vegetable”.

A market of too much and too little

Cabbage prices fell to as low as 0.13 yuan per jin, but growers are gradually becoming more rational

Jiang Shixin, 48 years old, has been growing Chinese cabbage for 20 years now. This “veteran grower” from Jingjia village in Tangwang town plants as much as 4 mu and as little as 2 mu a year, and has long since made it a habit. What's more, he plans to keep growing it this way in the future.

“When the price is low you earn a little less, when the price is high you earn a little more.” In November, which has just passed, the price of Tangwang Chinese cabbage dropped to 0.13 or 0.14 yuan per jin. Although Jiang Shixin felt it was a bit lower than in previous years, he did not feel very disappointed. “In 2014 the prices of most vegetables were generally cheap; even going by the market, the price of cabbage could not be that high.”

Monitoring data show that since winter-storage Chinese cabbage began coming onto the market in late October, the price of Chinese cabbage in Jinan has fallen for 5 consecutive weeks, with a cumulative drop of more than 50 percent. However, the low-level state did not last too long. In the past dozen days or so, as temperatures kept dropping, the price of Tangwang Chinese cabbage has slowly recovered to 0.28 yuan.

“Chinese cabbage is relatively simple to manage; you just water it four times and fertilize it twice.” Jiang Shixin did the accounts: for one mu, cabbage seed costs 20 yuan, chemical fertilizer 300 yuan, pesticide 80 yuan and base fertilizer 300 yuan, which comes to a cost of just 700 to 800 yuan, equivalent to a bit more than 0.1 yuan per jin. At the current vegetable price, growers can make a profit of about 0.1 yuan.

Yan Bingqiang, chairman of the Tangwang town Chinese Cabbage Industry Association, introduced that 2006 was the peak period for Tangwang Chinese cabbage, with a planting area of more than 17,000 mu, accounting for 23% of the town's cultivated land area.

At the winter harvest in 2011, heavy snow happened to hit, and the purchase price of Tangwang Chinese cabbage once rose to 0.7 or 0.8 yuan, and at its most expensive even reached 1 yuan per jin. Even so, in the following years the planting area of Tangwang Chinese cabbage did not grow substantially.

Yan Bingqiang introduced that in 2014 the Chinese cabbage planting area in Tangwang town was 8,000 mu, with an average yield of 9,000 jin per mu, nearly 20 percent higher than the previous year. “It is still mainly small household growers; few are large-scale.”

Li Zaichen, the deputy mayor of Tangwang town in charge of agriculture, said that after years of market experience, the growers of Tangwang town have gradually become more rational and no longer panic over price fluctuations. “It should be said that they all have a certain psychological tolerance. For example, last year when prices looked relatively low at the start, there were clearly more growers who stored their Chinese cabbage and were in no hurry to sell. When planting earlier, they also paid attention to staggering the timing and to mixing early-autumn and late-autumn varieties.”

Pressure under a pattern of large-scale circulation

Demand falls, supply rises, and the “staple vegetable” is no longer what it was

Not far from the Tangwang town government is the Hanxi vegetable wholesale market, one of the three major vegetable markets in Tangwang town. Every year in late November, it has to take on part of the task of purchasing and storing Chinese cabbage for Jinan. At present, the peak trading period for Chinese cabbage has passed, and the market looks somewhat deserted. Under the rain shelter, the 2,000 tons of Chinese cabbage purchased and stored by Jinan are neatly arranged, covered with thick straw mats.

Tangwang Chinese cabbage has long enjoyed the reputation of being one of the “four fine vegetables of Jinan”. In the 1980s, as the “staple vegetable” of the planned economy period, Tangwang Chinese cabbage accompanied countless Jinan residents through one long winter after another. Nowadays, vegetable production in Tangwang town is already completely different from those days.

“Tomatoes, eggplants, sweet peppers and so on; whatever is in the supermarket can basically be found here.” Han Huiping, the village party secretary, is both the person in charge of the market and the chairman of the village agricultural cooperative. “Now it is all intensive operation, and the scale and production level of vegetable growing have improved greatly compared with the past.”

By implementing a standardized production strategy, Tangwang town has established more than 20,000 mu of standardized vegetable production bases, enabling residents of the Jinan urban area to eat dozens of kinds of fresh vegetables all year round. The changes in vegetable growing methods and structure are also objectively squeezing the consumer demand for Chinese cabbage.