How did new farmer Li Jie become a model?
A model of the "new farmer"
-- A profile of Li Jie, chairman of the Xintiandi Planting Professional Cooperative in Xingyang City, Zhengzhou
By reporter Xia Xianqing, correspondent Wang Jianing
It happened to be the weekend, and Li Jie's 6-year-old youngest daughter was picking wildflowers in the field outside the house, skipping and jumping, which made him feel reassured as he sat in a meeting. As chairman of the Xintiandi Planting Professional Cooperative in Xingyang City, Henan Province, he rarely has time to look after his family.
Li Jie comes from an ordinary farming family in Gaocun Township, Xingyang City, Zhengzhou. After graduating from university, he worked in the food industry for 12 years. This work experience gave Li Jie a deeper understanding of agriculture: "Food security is the prerequisite for food safety. Without agriculture, how can we talk about development?" Although he had grown accustomed to city life, deep down he still missed the land of his hometown.
As policies to strengthen agriculture, benefit farmers and enrich rural areas intensified, Li Jie saw a huge opportunity for agricultural transformation and resolved to return home to start a business. "Rural areas offer vast horizons where much can be achieved," Li Jie said. Drawing on his many years of work experience in enterprises, he knew that agricultural production factors in rural areas were too scattered. To reduce the impact of market fluctuations on grain production and farmers' incomes, it was necessary to run grain production with an industrialized mindset and explore a high-yield creation model for quality commercial grain suited to field planting.
In 2011, Li Jie joined with 6 farming households and 18 skilled grain growers to establish the Xintiandi Planting Professional Cooperative, and set up "agricultural production factor workshops" in 50 villages in Xingyang City, providing farmers with full-process socialized services for grain production including agricultural materials, agricultural technology, agricultural machinery and storage. At the same time, it cooperated with more than 30 flour mills, more than 20 feed mills and the Henan Wanxi Pharmaceutical Factory to ensure timely grain purchase, giving farmers a "reassurance pill." In 2015, the Xintiandi cooperative's wheat yield reached 1,260 jin per mu, about 200 jin higher than Xingyang's average yield per mu; the recovery price was 1.3 yuan per jin, 0.15 yuan higher than the market price.
What is a new-type farmer? Li Jie's understanding is: "A 'new farmer' is someone who comes from rural areas and has a certain brand awareness and professional and cultural quality. They hope to use modern methods to achieve large-scale, mechanized agriculture in order to change traditional ways of working."
"Now seed supply, sowing, cultivation, harvesting and recovery are all done by machines. Work that used to take 3 days is now finished in half a day," Li Jie said. To make agricultural production standardized, the Xintiandi cooperative formed a vertical alliance with 3 other cooperatives, owning more than 200 agricultural machines and arranging plowing, sowing, harvesting and cutting in a unified way. In 2013, the cooperative built a 2,000-ton turnover warehouse for members' grain drying and turnover; in 2014, it leased 10 straight silos of 1,500 tons each for the storage of wheat from the agricultural production factor workshops.
The road of branding is hard to walk, but it must be walked. To reverse the situation of large price fluctuations in agricultural products and low protection of farmers' incomes, Li Jie grasped every step, from seed selection and fertilization at the source of grain production, to contracted cultivation and planting in the middle, to grain storage in the final stage, striving to ensure product quality.
Previously, 80% of Henan's high-quality strong-gluten and weak-gluten wheat needed to be imported from abroad. To change this situation, the Xintiandi cooperative introduced Xinmai 26 (wheat specially for bread flour) in 2012 and Yuyu 30 high-quality vitreous corn in 2015. At present, it has completed an order with Thailand's Chia Tai Group for the storage of single-variety corn.
The path of scale, standardization and branding was the right one, and the trend of "Internet Plus" also had to be kept up with. The Xintiandi cooperative led by Li Jie established a county-level internet service platform and village-level agricultural production factor workshop service stations, directly connecting with agricultural material enterprises and reducing agricultural material costs by 30%; through the internet, experts were invited to remotely analyze soil fertility data and formulate recipes, achieving precise monitoring and guidance. "'Piduoduo' is a 'B2B' platform we developed ourselves. It is now being tested and will be online soon," Li Jie said. The Xintiandi cooperative, integrating the procurement of means of production, high-yield grain cultivation, grain storage, agricultural technology and agricultural machinery services, and a rural e-commerce platform, carries more and more hopes.
Villager Hao Shuanghe from Houhou Village, Gaocun Township, Xingyang City, has 7 mu of land at home. After joining the cooperative, the average yield per mu rose from less than 500 jin to more than 1,200 jin now, increasing his annual income by nearly 5,000 yuan. Speaking of Li Jie, he was very excited: "He has helped us a lot! With the cooperative, I feel much more secure!" At present, the Xintiandi cooperative has 203 members and has radiated to and driven 12,000 farming households in 7 surrounding townships, uniformly planting 50,000 mu of Xinmai 26 strong-gluten wheat and Yuyu 30 machine-harvested corn, with an annual grain output of more than 100 million jin.
Li Jie said that this year, the Xintiandi cooperative plans to build a new agricultural machinery service company to provide agricultural machinery services for the agricultural production factor workshops.