Zheng Yanying, the mushroom-growing pioneer's road back home to start a business

In the Maoshan sub-farm of the Liaohe Farm in the Liaohe Agricultural Reclamation Management Area of Siping City, Jilin Province, when people mention Zheng Yanying, they all give a thumbs-up and call her the pioneer of returning-home entrepreneurship in shiitake mushroom cultivation. Zheng Yanying, 40 this year, has been growing shiitake mushrooms for six years. In these six years, she went from five shiitake mushroom greenhouses at the start to forming a cooperative and now founding a company, walking a solid path that leads her fellow villagers to prosperity together.

In 1998, while working in Anshan, Liaoning Province, Zheng Yanying saw that a friend growing shiitake mushrooms there was doing particularly well, and from then on she began to pay attention to information in this field. Whenever she had time, she studied the cultivation techniques and looked into sales channels. Every year when she returned to her hometown, she carefully surveyed the local shiitake mushroom market, and through these surveys she found that shiitake mushroom cultivation in the Liaohe reclamation area of her hometown was a market blank. She thought at the time that if she came back to develop shiitake mushroom cultivation, it would not only bring economic benefits but also fill the gap in shiitake mushroom cultivation technology in the Liaohe reclamation area; if done well, not only could she herself prosper, but she could also help the people around her prosper. After nearly 10 years of careful preparation, in 2008 she and her husband returned home from Anshan City to develop shiitake mushroom cultivation, and from then on the farmers of the Liaohe reclamation area had one more source of income from shiitake mushroom cultivation.

As the business got underway, one problem after another appeared before her: land, roads, funding. After coordinating through many channels, she built 5 shiitake mushroom greenhouses. After the greenhouses were built, on the one hand she trained workers in shiitake mushroom cultivation techniques, and on the other hand she led the workers in busy shiitake mushroom cultivation work every day before dawn. As the shiitake mushrooms grew day by day, Zheng Yanying felt that growing shiitake mushrooms was like carrying her own child, full of surprises every day. In the late autumn of 2008, she harvested her first pot of gold from shiitake mushroom cultivation. This gave Zheng Yanying and the workers hope and filled them with confidence for future development.

Zheng Yanying told the reporter: "I have now rented 2.4 hectares of land and built 5 heated shiitake mushroom greenhouses and 5 cold greenhouses. Each shiitake mushroom greenhouse can hold 25,000 shiitake mushroom substrate sticks; each stick can be harvested 6 times a year, each stick produces 2 jin of shiitake mushrooms each time, and one greenhouse can produce 50,000 jin of shiitake mushrooms a year. The current average wholesale price is about 5 yuan per jin, and one greenhouse has an annual output value of about 250,000 yuan. Around us, 13 farming households have already learned shiitake mushroom cultivation from me, and the largest one grows 89,000 sticks of shiitake mushrooms. Some farming households have also taken shares, mostly contributing raw materials, and the farming households with shares increase their income by at least 1,500 yuan or more each year."

Reporter Yan Hongyu