Material-free Gastrodia Cultivation Technology Successfully Developed in Guizhou

The fragile ecological environment of western China urgently needs protection, yet impoverished westerners urgently need to cut trees to cultivate Gastrodia to escape poverty, thus environmental protection and moderate prosperity have become a difficult contradiction. Now, with the maturing and promotion of the material-free Gastrodia cultivation technology by Yunlong Gastrodia Development Co., Ltd. in Dafang County, Guizhou Province, this contradiction has been readily resolved. Dafang County is located in the northwest of Guizhou Province. Due to its unique geographical environment and climatic conditions, the Gastrodia produced in Dafang is large in size, transparent in texture, and its gastrodin content and beneficial trace elements such as molybdenum, chromium, rubidium, cobalt, and copper are far higher than those in other regions. The product stands out both at home and abroad, and has long been known as "For Gastrodia in China, look to Guizhou; for Gastrodia in Guizhou, look to Dafang." Yunlong Company is a private science and technology enterprise integrating Gastrodia research, breeding, cultivation, deep processing, and packaging@#@136@#@. In 1998, the company undertook the regional Spark Science and Technology project: research on material-free Gastrodia cultivation technology. Through nearly a hundred repeated experiments, Yunlong Company ultimately used wild Gastrodia from Dafang as the seed source and successfully developed a sexual reproduction technology for Gastrodia suited to local climatic characteristics. Based on the biological characteristics of Armillaria mellea, it scientifically treated rural waste such as corn cobs and rice husks to replace wood for cultivation. This not only reduced the cost of Gastrodia cultivation, simplified the process, improved quality, and increased yield, but also fundamentally resolved the contradiction between Gastrodia cultivation and ecological protection. In June 2002, Chen Yiyu, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led an expert group to Dafang for an inspection and concluded that Yunlong Company's sexual reproduction technology for Gastrodia filled a gap in Gastrodia cultivation in Guizhou, and that material-free cultivation was undoubtedly a revolution in the history of Gastrodia cultivation. Guo Xiangwen, general manager of Yunlong Company, explained that Gastrodia is a plant without roots or leaves, needing neither to absorb nutrients from the soil nor to carry out photosynthesis. Its nutrient source comes from Armillaria mellea, and the main nutrition of Armillaria mellea comes from wood. Therefore, in the past, cultivating Gastrodia required wood. Since the 1970s, many experts and scholars have conducted extensive exploration and research on seed selection and breeding, standardized cultivation, and processing, storage, and transportation of wild Gastrodia, continuously improving the quality of Gastrodia and increasing its yield. Tens of thousands of farmers have escaped poverty and become prosperous by cultivating Gastrodia, but the problem that cultivating Gastrodia consumes large amounts of wood has never been solved. What experts and medicinal farmers did was merely research on the selection of wood texture, the ratio of quantities, the distribution of sizes and diameters, the depth of fish-scale openings, and the screening of soaking solutions, and none of them could find a substitute for wood. It is estimated that cultivating one mu of Gastrodia requires consuming 20,000 kg of broadleaf wood 5 cm thick, equivalent to cutting down 7 to 8 mu of mountain forest. In 2002, Yunlong Company used material-free cultivation technology to plant 400 mu of Gastrodia. In the past, 2,800 to 3,200 mu of lush trees would have disappeared completely. Dafang County plans to develop 20,000 mu of Gastrodia cultivation in the next 5 years. In the past, this would have meant that 140,000 to 160,000 mu of wood would be brutally felled. However, from now on, the traditional cultivation method of Gastrodia that "cuts flesh to patch sores" at the cost of sacrificing the ecological environment will never return with the birth and promotion of material-free cultivation technology.