A wild grass whose root looks like ginseng, once used only by the poor, now sells for 35 yuan per jin and has become a wealth-building grass for farmers.

As the living standards of farmers improve and farmland productivity rises, many farmers are gradually giving up growing traditional crops such as wheat, rice and corn, and starting to grow other cash crops, such as medicinal herbs, fruit and so on, while some wild grasses that farmers once paid no attention to have become favourites among these farmers as cash crops.

Anyone who has lived in the countryside surely knows that the most abundant thing in rural fields is wild grass, and some wild grasses look unremarkable but actually have great uses - for example, some can be eaten as wild vegetables, and some can be used as medicinal herbs, and so they are valued. Below, the author introduces one such wild grass.

In the morning, the author followed an old farmer friend from the village, Old Liu, to his farmland. In Old Liu's fields, what the author saw was not traditional crops such as corn and soybeans, but "special" crops like wild grasses, and one of them caught the author's attention. This wild grass is fairly common in rural mountain areas, and the author even used it as a child. This wild grass is "quanliao", though because its root resembles ginseng, it is also called "quanshen" (bistort).

Speaking of the wild grass quanshen, in rural areas of Gansu, Shandong, Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei and Anhui, quite a few older farmers in mountainous areas should be very familiar with it. Quanshen likes to grow in hillside grasslands and mountaintop meadows at altitudes of 800 m to 3000 m.

Old Liu said that in the past, when poor people in the mountain areas got sick, they basically did not go to hospital, but dug up wild grasses in the mountains to use, and quanshen was among them. Therefore many older farmers are also very fond of it, treating it as a free good medicine for illness, and now that living conditions are better, many farmers in the mountains have also started growing it, treating it as a wealth-building wild grass.

So what exactly are its uses? The author also consulted relevant materials. According to "Chinese Materia Medica", the root of quanshen, which resembles ginseng, can be used as medicine, with effects of clearing heat and draining dampness, cooling blood and stopping bleeding, and removing toxin and dispersing masses. It can be used to treat lung-heat cough, febrile disease with convulsions, red dysentery, heat diarrhoea, vomiting blood, nosebleed, haemorrhoid bleeding, and boils and sores.

It is precisely because quanshen has these effects that it is loved by farmers in the mountain areas, and now quite a few farmers have also begun to grow quanshen specially.

Old Liu told the author that quanshen is generally planted in early April. Compared with ordinary crops such as corn and rice, quanshen is still relatively easy to manage; as long as attention is paid to its requirements for temperature, water, light, air and nutrients at different growth stages, yields can basically be maintained. Moreover, quanshen is a perennial wild grass, so generally one planting can be harvested for several years, and the current market price of quanshen is relatively good, generally 25 to 35 yuan per jin, so it can also be considered a wealth-building grass for farmers in the mountains.

Dear friends, do you know about "quanshen"? You are welcome to leave a comment and share your experience.