Liu Guoan and villagers join hands on the road to shared prosperity
Liu Guoan turns and dries Chinese medicinal herbs.
Interviewing Liu Guoan really took the reporter quite some effort. He is too busy! In the morning he had to attend a meeting at the Naiman Banner Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau, in the afternoon he had to negotiate business with a medicinal herb dealer from Hebei Province, and even during the interview his phone never stopped ringing. No wonder - he runs the Naiman Banner Chinese and Mongolian Medicinal Herb Planting Demonstration Base, and more than a hundred households of villagers depend on him for their livelihood, so how could he not be busy?
Liu Guoan is the Party branch secretary of the concentrated contiguous development zone for facility agriculture in Sharaholai Town, Naiman Banner, and concurrently deputy Party branch secretary of Baobeihe Gacha. He is also the person in charge of the seed breeding base of the Naiman Banner Mongolian and Chinese Medicinal Herb Planting Core Demonstration Zone in Sharaholai Town, and chairman of Naiman Banner Guoan Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. After being discharged from the Liaoning Armed Police Corps in 2003, Liu Guoan set out on the road of entrepreneurship and prosperity. After several years of struggling in the business world, he always kept his fellow townspeople in his heart, always hoping that one day he could use his own strength to lead the villagers to prosperity together. Liu Guoan never forgot this wish from beginning to end. Even during those years when business lost money and he could barely take care of himself, he still actively helped villagers find markets and sell their crops.
In 2008, the Party committee and government of Naiman Banner actively responded to the national call to develop facility agriculture. Riding the east wind of policy, Liu Guoan also set his mind on developing facility agriculture. He took the initiative to approach the town government, coordinated and cooperated with relevant departments, and took the lead in contributing manpower and effort, ultimately making Baobeihe Village the first in the area to develop a 120-mu facility agriculture project, with 25 newly built greenhouses for growing vegetables and fruit. Apart from the 3 greenhouses he himself contracted as a lead example, the rest were contracted to villagers. In just one year, the facility agriculture area of Baobeihe Village grew to 2000 mu, with 528 greenhouses, and it also became the largest facility agriculture development zone in the Tongliao area at that time. The muskmelons, fresh peaches and other fruits grown there were sold as far away as Shenyang, Beijing and other places, and some trademarked products even entered the "National List of Top 100 Agricultural Products," giving the villagers hope for prosperity.
In 2014, at an agricultural exhibition, Liu Guoan saw the broad development prospects of medicinal herbs, so he tried planting several dozen mu of Chinese medicinal herbs, and the returns turned out to be very considerable. Having found a new planting direction, he seized the business opportunity in time and established the Bencao Medicinal Herb Planting Professional Cooperative, pursuing prosperity together with the villagers through growing medicinal herbs. During this period, Liu Guoan established long-term cooperative relationships with multiple pharmaceutical enterprises in Anguo City of Hebei Province, Shandong Province, Chifeng City and other places, and developed a distinctive Chinese and Mongolian medicinal herb planting industry through the "company + cooperative + farmers" model. In the cooperative, villagers can choose to transfer their land and work for the enterprise, achieving double insurance and double income; they can also choose to plant Chinese and Mongolian medicinal herb seeds and seedlings in their own irrigated land or courtyards, with the enterprise uniformly selling seeds and seedlings to villagers on credit, distributing agricultural materials, providing technical guidance and carrying out harvesting, selling and buyback work, truly realizing "one-stop" service from planting to harvest.
Li Hui, a villager from Sharaholai Forestry Farm, has been working in the cooperative for more than a year. Two years ago, Li Hui saw with his own eyes that Liu Guoan's medicinal herb planting had yielded a bumper harvest. As soon as he heard that Liu Guoan needed land, Li Hui unhesitatingly transferred all 50 mu of his family's land to him and came to work for Liu Guoan's company himself. Thinking back, when Li Hui painstakingly farmed those 50 mu of corn fields, he not only had to depend on the mood of "Heaven," but also worried and toiled all day long; even in a bumper year, he could only sell it for 20,000 yuan. But now, the transferred land alone brings a fixed rent of more than 30,000 yuan each year, working a day earns another hundred, and the annual net income can reach at least 50,000 yuan - simply a zero-risk, high-income, guaranteed-income-in-drought-or-flood good job. Talking about this, Li Hui could not help but grin with delight.
In the cooperative, there are 123 members like Li Hui who have embarked on the road to prosperity. In order to help more impoverished households shake off poverty and become prosperous as soon as possible, Liu Guoan also focused on including them as key targets for cooperative membership and care, and even provided many preferential conditions for impoverished households to join. Now, the 83 impoverished households in the cooperative have long since taken off the hat of poverty. By developing courtyard economy alone, villagers can earn 2000-3000 yuan per mu.
Today, the cooperative's members have increased from only a few at the beginning to more than a hundred now, radiating and driving surrounding people to plant more than 3000 mu of medicinal herbs. The base has also been confirmed as the Naiman Banner Chinese and Mongolian Medicinal Herb Planting Demonstration Base, a high-quality seed breeding base, and a National Agricultural Chamber of Commerce Agricultural Cooperative Demonstration Base. And Liu Guoan is getting closer and closer to his wish of achieving prosperity together with the villagers.