Growing scallions beats going out to work as a migrant; return home and work with the old Party secretary

In the photo, old Party secretary Liu Kexian (right) is in the field guiding scallion farmers on field management techniques.

"Last year my family grew 86 mu of scallions and made a net profit of more than 800,000 yuan. This year we planted another 110 mu, and if the market is normal, the income should be more than 1 million yuan. Our family could take the road to prosperity all thanks to the old Party secretary's technical guidance." On the morning of November 2, Li Aili, a villager from Wangchang Village, Huiting Town, Xiayi County, Henan Province, who was busy working in her family's hundred-mu scallion field, said emotionally as she talked about her family's experience of becoming well-off.

The old Party secretary Li Aili referred to is Liu Kexian, the village Party branch secretary, who is now 69 years old. Liu Kexian was originally a non-establishment cotton technician in Huiting Town. In the autumn of 2002, he returned to his hometown Wangchang Village to serve as Party branch secretary. After becoming a village cadre, Old Liu guided the masses to grow cotton on a large scale to develop the "white economy," while he himself served as the villagers' volunteer technical adviser. How to raise seedlings, how to transplant, and how to prevent and control pests and diseases, he patiently taught the masses one by one, hand in hand. Although planting cotton after the wheat harvest yields much more than planting corn, because cotton cultivation is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and with the rise of industries such as casting and lighters in Huiting Town, villagers increasingly chose to work in enterprises for wages, cotton planting gradually decreased, and Old Liu's cotton-growing skills gradually had no place to be used.

In recent years, seeing that the masses were paying less and less "attention" to farming, Liu Kexian began to mutter to himself again: through working as migrants, the masses' incomes were higher, but the output efficiency of the land was declining day by day, and this was not a solution either. To improve land efficiency, large-scale planting and high-efficiency crops should be developed.

In March 2014, Liu Kexian first selected the young farmers Niu Lixiang and Li Aili, a couple who could endure hardship and were willing to study deeply, encouraged them to transfer land and develop large-scale operations, and proposed the idea of growing scallions. He also helped him rent more than 40 mu of land for a trial. To ensure success, Liu Kexian, regardless of his advanced age, learned scallion cultivation techniques on his own through various means, and after learning the techniques, he served as a good technical adviser to Niu Lixiang. That year, the scallions Niu Lixiang planted had a bumper harvest, and the income was clearly a notch higher than what the couple earned from working as migrants. In the past two years, Niu Lixiang, having tasted the benefits, gradually expanded the planting scale, and his income rose year by year.

Under Liu Kexian's guidance and Niu Lixiang's drive, Wangchang Village transferred more than 800 mu of land this year and developed more than 10 large scallion-growing households. Wangchang Village also became a locally famous specialized scallion-growing village.