Returning to his hometown to start a business, he turned a thousand mu of mountain land into a tea plantation, leading the villagers to prosperity together
On the 3rd, the high-mountain tea plantation at an altitude of 800 m in Dongshan Village, Siqian Township, Guangze County, was a scene of bustling activity: more than a dozen hilltops of varying shapes were covered in lush green tea bushes, dozens of women wearing sun hats were picking tea by hand, and tea-picking machines were busy at work...
Speaking of this thousand-mu high-mountain tea plantation, one cannot help but mention the story of tea factory owner Li Xuelin returning to his hometown to start a business 6 years ago.
Li Xuelin, now 48 years old, dropped out of school before finishing junior high. He had worked as a painter, a security guard, and a foreman at an entertainment company, and had also done business in timber and jewelry. In 2003, on his wife's suggestion, the couple went to Longyan to join the family business "Zhenhua Auto Parts Chain Store" run by his father-in-law, becoming one of the shareholders of the Chen family business.
By a chance occasion, Li Xuelin bought a few boxes of "Gankeng Black Tea" from his hometown and gave them to the boss of a company in Fuzhou. Unexpectedly, after tasting it, the boss praised it endlessly and suggested that he return to his hometown to develop the tea hills and set up a tea factory. The speaker meant nothing by it, but the listener took it to heart. After returning, Li Xuelin tossed and turned, unable to sleep, thinking about this issue all night. In the end, after obtaining the consent of his wife and parents-in-law, he returned to his hometown, which he had left for twenty or thirty years, and began his tea-planting plan.
Everything is difficult at the beginning. Li Xuelin found several friends from his own village group (Yaotan Group, Huangfang Village) and told them about his plan to develop the tea hills. Everyone welcomed the idea, but the plan to rent over a thousand mu of mountain land could not be realized for various reasons, so Li Xuelin had no choice but to give up the idea of developing a tea plantation in his own village group.
Just when Li Xuelin was worrying while running around looking for a large area of high-altitude mountain land, a former village director of the nearby Dongshan Village, Lei Linsheng, gave him a glimmer of hope. It turned out that Dongshan Village had a stretch of mountain land at an altitude of seven or eight hundred meters, with more than a dozen hilltops and an area of about a thousand mu, which was exactly an ideal site for developing a tea plantation. Through Lei Linsheng's introduction, Li Xuelin quickly reached an intention to rent the land with the leaders of Dongshan Village. At the end of 2010, Li Xuelin signed a mountain land lease agreement with Dongshan Village and invested more than 2 million yuan to purchase the 30-year land use rights for this nearly thousand-mu stretch of mountain land.
With the mountain land secured, Li Xuelin immediately applied to the relevant township and county departments for project approval. After approval, he organized personnel and machinery and equipment to enter the site for construction. Seven large excavators worked for a full half year before turning the more than a dozen hilltops, from top to bottom, into ring-shaped terraced tea fields around the mountains. Then manual crews were organized for further trimming. After a year of preparation in total, as soon as the Spring Festival of the following year passed, another 3 months were spent, and the nearly thousand mu of newly renovated tea hills were clothed in green. In 2012, Li Xuelin joined with 5 local villagers to establish the "Guangze County Jindou Tea Professional Cooperative." At the same time, he applied to the relevant departments for registration and established "Nanping City Lindingxiang Tea Co., Ltd.," beginning to handle externally a series of business matters such as tea production and sales.
"This year 50,000 kg of fresh tea leaves can be picked, producing 5,000 kg of the main product 'Lindingxiang Black Tea.' Calculated at the lowest price of 320 yuan per kg, the output value can reach 1.6 million yuan." Li Xuelin said that this year is the second year of harvesting from the tea hills, the yield is not yet high, and the returns are not very ideal. Starting next year, as the management of the tea hills is further improved, the yield will certainly be higher and the returns greater. Li Xuelin plans, after this year's spring tea harvest, to invest another 1 million yuan to purchase a complete set of deep-processing equipment, making full preparations for producing a higher-quality "Lindingxiang Black Tea" next year that meets market demand. At the same time, on the basis of doing a good job with the tea brand, he will actively seek matching funds from the Ministry of Agriculture's "tea hill road hardening" project supporting tea development (width 2.7 m, thickness 13 cm), invest another 1 million yuan, and build 10 km of standardized tea hill roads, and put in a certain amount of funds for the construction of tea hill water conservancy and irrigation facilities and the optimization of factory buildings. As the tea industry grows larger and larger, the tea plantation needs more and more hired workers. It is understood that this year the tea plantation's year-round employees reached 20 people, and during the tea production season the workforce was 80 people (including 20 skilled workers), providing employment for more than a hundred local people.
"If one person gets rich, that does not count as being rich. In the production and management of this thousand-mu tea plantation, I want to lead the cooperative members and more surrounding people to get rich together. This is my original intention in running this tea plantation well." Regarding the prospects for the tea plantation's future development, Li Xuelin is full of confidence.