College student village officials help flower growers escape poverty
Ma Yaxin (left) discussing flower cultivation techniques with villagers.
Right now, although it is the depths of winter, in the corridor of villager Bao Fafa's home in Xiasadikeyuzi Village, Sadikeyuzi Township, Yining County, **Uyghur Autonomous Region, it is full of spring. The radishes, morning glories, cockscombs, and money trees planted here are beginning to turn green, and have bloomed with scattered flowers, making people very happy.
Bao Fafa, busy feeding the cattle, told the reporter, we Hui people love to grow flowers, but earning money by growing flowers is still a first for us, and the whole village being able to escape poverty and become prosperous is all thanks to Ma Yaxin. Ma Yaxin, whom Bao Fafa mentioned, is a college student village official in Sadikeyuzi Township. In 2016, Ma Yaxin was assigned by the township Party committee to work in the village task force in Xiasadikeyuzi Village. The team members working alongside her came from relevant functional departments at the prefecture, county, and township levels, and all were experts in rural work. Ma Yaxin decided to seize this rare learning opportunity, improve her abilities, and strive to do some practical things for the villagers.
Xiasadikeyuzi Village is made up of people from 8 ethnic groups including Hui, Han, Uyghur, and Kazakh, and the villagers have a certain ability in flower cultivation and management. Every year, more than 50 farming households in the village cultivate flowers on their own for beautifying and greening their own courtyards and front gates. In addition, more than 100 people in the village engage in greening and municipal maintenance work in the county seat every spring.
"Let the poor people in the village also have work to do, money to earn, and something to look forward to for a happy life." This was Ma Yaxin's original intention and goal in carrying out her work. Based on this, after carefully analyzing the village's disadvantages and advantages for development, Ma Yaxin decided to seize the momentum, guide the villagers according to the situation, and lead them to develop the flower industry, turning "smallholder flowers" into "market flowers." After she shared her ideas with the comrades in the village task force, she received strong support from the task force, and the "Yining County Huahuinong Flower Planting Professional Cooperative" was established soon after.
After the professional cooperative was established, Ma Yaxin and the cadres of the village task force spent two weeks visiting all 128 households in difficulty in the village and held Party member meetings and village meetings. They identified 42 particularly poor households as the main targets for assistance, of which 15 were households for targeted assistance. Afterwards, Ma Yaxin, the task force cadres, and the village cadres distributed the 16,000 flower seedlings they had cultivated themselves, free of charge, to the poor households each had paired up to assist. From then on, the vigorous work of flower seedling cultivation began.
Provide the necessities for flower production uniformly and free of charge. The pesticides, seeds, plug trays, and other means of production needed by poor households to grow flowers were provided uniformly and free of charge by the village committee and the village task force. The village committee and the village work group provided poor households, free of charge, for the first time with 900,000 marigolds, 60,000 cockscombs, 12,000 morning glories, 500 bags of pesticides, 4,000 plug trays, and 1.1 million nutrient bags. Poor households only needed to raise the flower seedlings until they bloomed and sell them to the flower cooperative at 0.4 yuan per plant to earn labor income.
Carry out flower planting technical training. With strong support from the village committee and the village work group, Ma Yaxin invited flower experts from the prefecture and county to carry out flower planting technical training for poor households. In order to let poor households grasp flower planting techniques more intuitively and deeply, she also carefully produced 8 courseware presentations on flower planting techniques and kept organizing poor households to watch and study them.
Establish flower planting and cultivation logs. In order to better help poor households plant and cultivate flowers and ensure income, the village also established 80 flower planting and cultivation logs, recording the growth and existing problems of each household's flowers every day, so as to promptly solve various difficulties encountered in the process of flower planting and cultivation.
The flowers bloomed, and the purchasing work also began. The cadres of the village task force gave full play to their networking advantages and opened up sales channels widely. The urban construction department of Yining County implemented "full purchase" of the flowers from Xiasadikeyuzi Village, and major enterprises and schools in Yining County, as well as Horgos City and Yining City, also sent in orders one after another. The vision of turning "smallholder flowers" into "market flowers" became a reality. In 2016, the 80 flower cultivation households in the village had sold 600,000 flowers of various kinds, with income reaching 240,000 yuan, and 15 targeted poverty alleviation households successfully escaped poverty.