The wealth-building experience of Deng Ping, a young man who returned home to start a business

Deng Ping, a young man from Fulong Town, Shizhong District, Neijiang City, returned home to start a business growing off-season vegetables and fruits, with an annual profit of 700,000 yuan.

Deng Ping is a genuine rural boy, born in 1979 in Group 4, Dawuchong Village, Fulong Town, Shizhong District, Neijiang City. His family was poor, and all his ancestors were farmers. He graduated from Fulong Town Junior High School in 1995, and in 1997 began working in Guangzhou, doing so for more than ten years.

Deng Ping had a different understanding of farming, and this understanding came from an accidental inspiration. In 2007, the company he worked for organized a trip, which included an agricultural product picking activity. At the time, they went to an agricultural park to pick watermelons, and through chatting with a local farmer he learned something that astonished him greatly. He asked that melon farmer how many watermelons one mu of land could produce, and the farmer told him ten thousand jin. "Good heavens! Ten thousand jin?!" He thought he had misheard, so he confirmed again. "That's right, exactly ten thousand jin. With good growing, it can reach twelve or thirteen thousand." Those who don't understand agriculture may have no concept of this number. But Deng Ping, who came from a rural background, thought at the time: Sichuan, his hometown, also grows watermelons, and with open-field planting, a good harvest yields one thousand jin. Why is the gap so large? How was this achieved? Later, through investigation, he learned that artificially creating conditions for plant growth is the key. For example, temperature, humidity, fertilizer and water, light, and pest and disease management. Temperature is regulated by greenhouses, while humidity and fertilizer-water use drip irrigation technology, which not only makes humidity controllable but also saves labor. These are the keys to high yield, and they can also bring products to market earlier. Although the hardware investment is somewhat higher, by a conservative calculation, with products priced at an average of one yuan per jin minus investment, it amounts to a net profit of more than 5,000 yuan per mu.

Compared with the traditional agriculture model of relying on weather for food, the gap is simply too large. Traditional agriculture has too many drawbacks: drought brings no harvest, and too much rain also brings no harvest. There is also the most fatal factor: even in a bumper harvest year, because of concentrated market arrival and supply exceeding demand, prices are generally low, sometimes so low that one loses everything! Growing off-season vegetables and fruits, bringing them to market earlier, and scientific planting are the way out for agriculture. This is what Deng Ping understood, so he decided to give up a stable job and return home to start a business.

Nothing is ever smooth sailing. In 2008, despite the opposition of family and friends, Deng Ping resolutely gave up his job and returned home to pick up the hoe again and farm. In the eyes of others, he was a madman whose head had short-circuited. Although in Guangzhou he did not have much of a promising future, after all, compared with his own hometown, he had a stable income and, besides supporting his family, still had a certain surplus. Many people, including relatives and friends, would ask him: "How much development can there be in returning home to start a business? In our countryside, where we rely on the weather for food, can we really support a family by farming our own one mu and three fen of land?"

Not being understood is frightening, but Deng Ping was strong inside. Even now he still remembers a sentence a friend said to him: "If you want to be rich, build roads; if you want to be poor, build greenhouses." As for how this saying came about, at the time he really did not understand it. In the first year, full of confidence, he contracted 30 mu of land and built greenhouses, planting Qilin watermelons that were one or two months earlier than open-field watermelons and twice as expensive. This kind of melon tastes good, but its rind is thin and it does not withstand long-distance transport, so Qilin melons from other places are hard to ship to the local market, which was relatively speaking also an advantage, so Deng Ping chose to grow this variety. But the first year quickly confirmed what his friend had said: due to insufficient technology and inadequate management, when the melons were almost ripe, all the melon seedlings died, and that year there was no harvest at all. He was very disappointed, but not despairing. Now he understood why growing greenhouses makes people poor: the key lies in technology. Once the arrow is shot, there is no turning back; having found the reason for failure, he had to overcome the difficulty. He went to consult many professionals, but felt it was still not enough. He heard that a friend in Zhejiang had rich experience in growing this, so he made a special trip to Zhejiang and studied in the fields for half a year, and finally succeeded in planting in the second year. That year the net profit was about 200,000 yuan. At present, his planting area is more than one hundred mu, with an annual profit of about 700,000 yuan.

In 2015, under the guidance of local government agricultural technicians, Deng Ping innovated his planting model by interplanting watermelons with off-season vegetables such as late-maturing bitter melon, and the initial trial succeeded.

In March 2016, Deng Ping established a vegetable planting professional cooperative in Dawuchong Village, Fulong Town, contracting about 140 mu of land in the early stage, and planned to expand the off-season vegetable planting area year by year. With government support, he prepared to build a modern vegetable planting industrial park, which would both improve land utilization and solve employment for more surplus labor in the surrounding area, while providing surrounding farmers with advanced planting technology and moving toward common prosperity.