Growing sweet potatoes into something remarkable: How did Wang Hailong do it

As soon as spring began, in Mengzhai Village, Zhouying Township, Shenqiu County, Henan Province - a "sweet potato planting specialist village" - the widely known "Sweet Potato King" Wang Hailong was already busy preparing the land, buying agricultural film, and selecting sweet potato seed tubers. A new year of farming life was about to begin.

"In recent years, the sweet potatoes I've grown have all been high-quality varieties - ecological, pollution-free, high-yielding, good-looking, and uniform and plump in size," Wang Hailong said. From this alone, his annual sales income is more than 200,000 yuan. His family became prosperous and well-off by growing sweet potatoes, and at the same time, he also led his fellow villagers out of poverty toward prosperity, allowing them to live a good life they had never dared to imagine before.

The soil in Shenqiu County is mostly sandy, which is suitable for sweet potato growth. Wang Hailong began trying large-scale sweet potato cultivation.

"Traditional farming relies on experience. As the saying goes, you don't need to learn farm work - just do what others do. But that's not actually true; farming is skilled work," Wang Hailong said.

In order to introduce good varieties and learn techniques, Wang Hailong traveled to agricultural science academies and institutes in Zhengzhou and Beijing, and took large sweet potato growers as his teachers to exchange ideas and learn from their experience. He successfully introduced 6 types of new high-quality, high-yield sweet potato varieties, some of which reached nearly ten thousand jin per mu. In the planting and management stages, he did not apply chemical fertilizers or spray pesticides. He used farmyard manure and organic fertilizer, and used biological pesticides specially for sweet potatoes to prevent and control pests and diseases. Because of this, many people in the village did not understand and said he did not know how to do accounts. Wang Hailong said: "How can you only calculate the current account and not the long-term account? Only calculate the economic account and not the social benefit account?"

In order to develop the sweet potato planting industry on a larger scale and drive the surrounding people to increase their income and become prosperous by growing sweet potatoes, the year before last, Wang Hailong took the initiative to bring more than 20 impoverished households in the village into the agricultural planting cooperative he founded, developing contiguous large-scale sweet potato planting of more than 800 mu each year, with an annual output of more than 2,400 tons of fresh sweet potatoes, and products sold to Beijing, Shanghai, Changsha, Wuhan and other places.

Wang Hailong also secured the hosting of training classes by city and county agricultural experts at his place to promote and spread advanced sweet potato planting concepts. Because the sweet potatoes Wang Hailong grows taste good and look good, they are especially popular with consumers. Wang Hailong said: "As long as you grow good sweet potatoes, you don't have to worry about not being able to sell them."

Entering the new year, Wang Hailong is full of confidence. And so, while the cooperative is developing vigorously, he also plans to build green sightseeing tourism agriculture. "In the not-too-distant future, I will continue to make the sweet potato industry bigger and stronger, strive to obtain funding support from national projects, and turn this place into an industrial park for vegetable planting, forest fruit picking, livestock and poultry breeding, fish pond fishing, and sweet potato planting and deep processing, forming a complete green agricultural tourism sightseeing park," Wang Hailong said. He is a native-born, genuine farmer, and his biggest dream is to grow sweet potatoes into something even more "remarkable," lead the villagers to become prosperous together and move toward a moderately prosperous life, and be a "Sweet Potato King" in the truest sense.