Potatoes Turn into Gold Beans: Cao Zhigang's Virtuous Wife Is the Hero Behind It
At 12 noon on September 27, Cao Zhigang, a villager of Shagang Village, Huoshizhai Township, Xiji County, called his wife and said he would definitely be home for lunch before 1 p.m., so his wife set out the bowls and chopsticks and waited obediently.
By 1:30, the dishes had already been reheated once, and the rice had gone cold in the rice cooker. His wife was furious. How could she have any appetite to eat? She rushed out the door to look for Cao Zhigang.
This man who did not keep his word was indeed squatting in the cooperative's potato field again. Several cooperative members around him all smiled apologetically when they saw her arrive.
"What key scientific and technological achievement are you researching that you can't spare the time for one meal?" his wife said with a dark face. "I got a big order. A client from Shandong wants a product quality analysis. It concerns the wallets of our cooperative members, so I dawdled a bit..." Cao Zhigang pouted, and the members also chimed in, managing to head off the angry words his wife was about to say.
"'Potato Cao' oh 'Potato Cao,' if standing in the field with your feet in the soil, wind and rain and sun could fill your belly, I'd save myself the worry and stop cooking! When you're swallowing stomach medicine handful by handful and rolling around in bed, who's the one worrying about you?" Leaving that one sentence behind, his wife turned and walked away, and a few minutes later she became a black dot on the horizon.
"What should we do, brother? Sister-in-law is really angry." Member Wang Fude was a little worried. "It's fine. Let's hurry and finish. When I get back later, you'll see how I criticize her." Cao Zhigang forced a smile.
In fact, Cao Zhigang knew that his wife had a sharp tongue but a soft heart. In 2013, he took the lead in carrying out a three-year rotation planting of potato seed potatoes, Chinese medicinal herbs, and minor autumn coarse grains on his own contracted land, and established Zhonghe Cooperative and Baicaoyuan Agricultural Science and Technology Park. At the time, his wife neither endorsed nor opposed it, but she voluntarily took on all the housework and farm work.
The handbook on the essentials of rotation planting had already been distributed, but the educational levels and practical abilities of the 121 cooperative members were uneven, and nearly half still had shortcomings in late-stage management of planting. In order to guarantee the members' income, Cao Zhigang spent every day in the potato fields with everyone, overcoming one technical difficulty after another. The village opened a 3,500-mu demonstration site for potato variety planting, and the cooperative farmers' per capita net income increased from 3,800 yuan in 2013 to 5,125 yuan in 2015.
After a detailed investigation, Cao Zhigang found that although the yields of seed potato breeding and Chinese medicinal herb planting had increased, the product sales channels were not broad. When he decided to use the several tens of thousands of yuan he had painstakingly dug out of the ground to seek sales channels and markets, his wife did not stop him; when clients from Xi'an, Qinghai, Jinan, and other places came to the house to discuss business, she even acted as a "secretary," working with her husband to recommend the members' potatoes.
In 2015, in order to better lead disadvantaged people to prosperity and improve farmers' scientific and technological quality, Cao Zhigang founded the "Baicaoyuan Farmers' Field School" and established a five-in-one operating model combining "agricultural projects + scientific and technological talent + cooperative organizations + production bases + teaching and training" with agricultural production and scientific and technological demonstration, promotion, and services. Each year it trained 1,100 farmer visits, with training content focused mainly on planting and breeding techniques, and based on enhancing farmers' legal awareness and financial knowledge. The training scope covered 2,200 farmer visits across the entire township. Before each training session, his wife would carefully check the list and help her husband organize the trainees.
By the time the testing was done, it was already 2:50 p.m. When Cao Zhigang returned home, he found that the meal covered with bowls on the dining table was still warm.
"Someone like you deserves to starve a hole in your stomach!" His wife's voice came from the bedroom: "Is the food cold? I'm not heating it up for you. Heat it again and it won't be fit to eat."
"Truly worthy of the three treasures of Xiji -- potato, potato, and potato; heat it up and it gets even softer and more tender." Shoveling most of the plate of shredded potato with vermicelli into his bowl, Cao Zhigang joked while eating, until sweat beaded on the tip of his nose. This meal had a different flavor for him.