College-graduate village official Tubuxin: Growing wood ear mushrooms after "switching careers midway"

Tubuxin answers villagers' questions about cultivation.

After graduating from Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities in 2015 with a major in accounting, Tubuxin was selected and hired as a college-graduate village official and returned to his hometown, Harichulu Gacha in Arvenggele Town, to serve as assistant to the gacha head. While doing all the village affairs work well, Tubuxin often went into the village and visited households to listen to the people's demands. He found that several villagers in the gacha grew black wood ear mushrooms with very considerable returns, and that the characteristics of black wood ear mushroom cultivation - easy to manage, low labor intensity and low cost - were exactly suited to the elderly and women in the gacha who could not do heavy physical labor.

After consulting materials and making careful comparisons, Tubuxin believed that Harichulu Gacha fully met the requirements for growing black wood ear mushrooms, and he decided to make black wood ear mushroom cultivation hisentrepreneurial project, and from then on began a arduous yet resolute entrepreneurial path. At the beginning of this year, with the help of the town Party committee and government, Tubuxin used the "three-to-village, three-to-household" funds and the autonomous region's poverty alleviation funds to establish Arvenggele Town's first black wood ear mushroom cultivation professional demonstration park and led 30 poor villagers in planting 150,000 sticks of black wood ear mushrooms. The demonstration park also became Arvenggele Town's first college-student entrepreneurship demonstration park base.

During university, Tubuxin's major was far removed from cultivation, so growing wood ear mushrooms now could be called "switching careers midway." In the early days of starting the business, whenever Tubuxin had free time he would leaf through relevant books, search for information online, watch instructional videos, and seek advice from experts, often staying up until midnight. In order to select good spawn, he hired a technician from Heilongjiang, and often went to the homes of professional black wood ear mushroom growers in the town to learn experience and ask questions, gradually mastering black wood ear mushroom cultivation techniques.

In August this year, Tubuxin led 30 poor households to establish the "Harichulu Black Wood Ear Mushroom Professional Cooperative." The black wood ear mushrooms grown by cooperative members follow the principles of household harvesting, unified placement and unified management. Cooperative members growing black wood ear mushrooms can earn an average annual income of 10,000 yuan, far higher than the returns from field crops.

Tubuxin also continuously improved the packaging of black wood ear mushroom products, actively explored new sales models, opened up online sales channels, and sought a larger and broader market. In the next step, Tubuxin wants to build a brand and achieve integration of cultivation and sales.

Tubuxin said full of confidence: "A few days ago, the banner Party committee helped us build a new 1,000-square-meter spawn cultivation room and funded the cooperative in purchasing new equipment, helping us solve our urgent needs. Next year the cooperative will expand its scale, and by then it can produce 800,000 bags of spawn sticks, driving 160 surrounding poor households to get rich together."