Decoding the production and sales pain points behind the heartwarming potatoes
In the depths of winter, a deeply moving heartwarming story spread far and wide: Ma Muhaimai, an elderly farmer from Qinghai, hauled 32 tons of potatoes from this year's harvest all the way to Shenzhen to sell, and after being turned away by market buyers, the batch of potatoes was bought up by kind-hearted Shenzhen citizens through a "chain of love." While praising the warm-hearted love of Shenzhen citizens, this writer cannot help but lament the elderly Qinghai farmer's bittersweet ordeal.
The "heartwarming potatoes" reflect the pain points in the current linkage between agricultural production and sales. Against the backdrop of supply-side structural reform in agriculture, what variety to plant, how much to plant, how to plant it? To whom to sell? Many traditional farmers are still in a muddled state, gambling on their plantings, and this is pain point number one; self-production and self-marketing, doing no market research, signing no production and sales contracts, seeking no brokers, believing every rumor they hear, blindly following the crowd and leaving things to luck, with poor sales information and blocked channels, this is pain point number two; lacking both good appearance and distinctive features, when faced with standardization, green production and branding, if you cannot lay claim to any of them, how can you win consumers' recognition? This is pain point number three. Besides farmers needing to be alert in these respects, some local governments and service organizations must also attach great importance to the problem of farmers struggling to sell their produce.
Where there is pain, one must feel the ache. The market does not believe in tears; from a rational perspective, what love bought was people's hearts, not goods in the market. When it comes to establishing and improving the agricultural production and sales system, this writer sincerely hopes that embarrassing ordeals like Ma Muhaimai's will become "fewer, and fewer still."