Suqian, Jiangsu: A "Golden Phoenix" of Prosperity Takes Flight from the Vegetable Fields

Zhou Xiangmin, a bona fide farmer from Longmen Neighborhood Committee, Chengxiang Subdistrict, Siyang County, Suqian City, holds only a high school diploma, yet he set his sights on a path of large-scale rural land management.

In 2006, he founded the Siyang County Baichunjin Vegetable Production Cooperative, took the lead in transferring land, and began growing vegetables. Later, he mobilized nearby farmers to join the cooperative, gathering scattered plots from individual households to develop vegetable growing as a collective, gradually forming the advantages of large-scale production and turning once low-yielding farmland into a "gold mine" that "yields a fortune at every sunrise."

Facing Setbacks with Composure, Devoting Himself to Mastering Techniques

In the early days of his venture, Zhou Xiangmin encountered many setbacks and failures. At the end of 2009, a heavy snowstorm struck suddenly. Lacking experience, the vegetable greenhouses initially built with bamboo were completely crushed by the snow, and over 300 mu of carefully tended vegetable fields were destroyed by the natural disaster. The enormous loss cast a pall over Zhou Xiangmin and his family. Sparing no thought for the Spring Festival, Zhou Xiangmin devoted himself to taking post-disaster remedial measures while carefully reviewing lessons learned and actively organizing production self-rescue efforts.

A fall into the pit, a gain in the wit. Having weathered this setback, Zhou Xiangmin understood deeply the importance of science and technology. From then on, he dedicated himself to studying high-efficiency agricultural cultivation techniques - building steel-frame vegetable greenhouses to solve the problem of poor structural stability; hiring agricultural technical experts during the slack farming season each year to give technical lectures; and establishing a technical training group that combined on-site demonstrations with centralized instruction to teach key techniques to cooperative members.

Today, Zhou Xiangmin and his fellow members have all built new-type steel-frame greenhouses or multi-span greenhouse structures, adopting new equipment and techniques such as insect-proof nets, shade nets, and sprinkler and drip irrigation, greatly raising both production levels and disaster-resistance capacity.

Gathering Scattered Production into a Whole, Rapidly Boosting Returns

Beyond transferring land himself to grow vegetables, Zhou Xiangmin actively encouraged surrounding farmers to join the cooperative and develop vegetable cultivation, consolidating land from individual households so that the cooperative could arrange production uniformly and give full play to the advantages of large-scale management.

In the spring of 2010, villager Wang Hengzeng made up his mind to join the cooperative and contracted 40 mu of land for vegetable growing. Zhou Xiangmin taught Wang Hengzeng hand-in-hand how to select varieties, manage the fields well, and stagger crop rotations, and designed for him a "three-dimensional" planting model with three harvests a year. Over the course of a year, Wang Hengzeng made a profit of more than 300,000 yuan. "A 'golden phoenix' really has flown out of the vegetable fields!" Having tasted the sweetness of joining the cooperative for unified production, Wang Hengzeng could hardly contain his excitement. Seeing Wang Hengzeng's success, other farmers gained great confidence and joined the cooperative one after another, embarking on the path of vegetable growing.

At present, Zhou Xiangmin's cooperative has 344 member households, with a facility-based vegetable area of 1,600 mu, an open-air base area of 450 mu, a vegetable processing factory of 2,200 sq m, annual sales revenue of 43 million yuan, annual profit of more than 10 million yuan, and per-mu returns exceeding 5,000 yuan.

Income-Boosting Insights: Many farmers find it hard to let go of their land, yet struggle with the low returns of growing traditional crops; specialty cultivation leaves them under-resourced and lacking in technical know-how. By establishing a cooperative, Zhou Xiangmin gathered the scattered into a whole, unified production, pursued large-scale management and scientific cultivation, greatly improving agricultural production efficiency and bringing prosperity to local people.