Xiong Dedong: "Teach a man to fish" and lead the masses out of poverty toward prosperity
Xiong Dedong inspects the fruit trees
In the stretch after stretch of citrus orchards in Yangping Village, Bayang Town, Yunyang County, a busy figure can often be seen weaving among them, whether pruning and bending branches or watering and fertilizing, every movement skilled, nimble and meticulous. This person is Xiong Dedong, known to every household in Yangping Village. When people talk about him, they cannot help but give a thumbs-up. The story of how he worked hard to learn fruit tree care techniques and "teach a man to fish," leading the masses to develop the citrus fruit industry and increase their incomes, begins with the development history of Newhall navel oranges in Yangping Village.
Taking over the heavy burden midway
Fourteen years ago, after Xiong Dedong's older brother Xiong Defu became Party branch secretary of Yangping Village, in order to lead everyone to prosperity, after investigating many options, he decided to lead everyone in improving cultivation by planting Newhall navel oranges. But Yangping Village had grown red tangerines since ancient times. The masses could not accept it at first, so Xiong Defu cultivated them himself, piloted them first, distributed seedlings, provided technical guidance and so on. After countless hardships, everyone finally decided to try planting Newhall navel oranges.
However, fortune is unpredictable. In the second year of everyone's trial planting, Xiong Defu fell seriously ill and passed away. For the entire Yangping Village, this was an immense sorrow. For a time, the Newhall navel orange industry in Yangping Village lost its backbone, the villagers lost their "bellwether," and the village had no technician. For the vast majority of villagers who had just pinned their hopes on Newhall navel orange saplings but lacked their own experience in fruit tree care techniques, this was undoubtedly the hardest fact to accept.
The villagers' helplessness and worry plunged Xiong Dedong into deep grief and reflection. Whenever he closed his eyes, the scene of his brother leading everyone to prosperity and earnestly persuading everyone to switch to planting Newhall navel oranges would surface in his mind. He decided to turn grief into strength, to fulfill his brother's last wish, to honor the promise made to the people, to become an excellent agricultural technician, and to lead everyone in continuing to develop Newhall navel orange planting well, so as to increase villagers' production and incomes and set them on the road out of poverty toward prosperity.
"At that time my brother was the only technician in the whole village. After my brother passed away, everyone was completely in the dark when it came to planting Newhall navel oranges. The village urgently needed this kind of talent. So I worked hard to read the care logs and technical books my brother had written during his lifetime, learning and figuring things out through practice as I went. I applied the theoretical knowledge I learned to my own fruit trees, and after it was verified, I passed on what I had learned to the villagers." Xiong Dedong said, pointing to the thick stack of notebooks and materials his brother had left behind.
According to Xiong Dedong's recollection, sometimes when he encountered something he did not understand or was unsure about, he would run to the government and the Agriculture Committee to consult agricultural experts. Xiong Dedong had already become a regular visitor to the town government and the Agriculture Committee. Less than half a year after his brother Xiong Defu passed away, the Newhall navel oranges planted in Yangping Village welcomed their first bumper harvest, and many villagers' income from growing fruit trees doubled compared with previous years.
Selfless dedication, passing on true expertise
Through continuous learning and exploration, Xiong Dedong skillfully mastered the scientific planting and care techniques for Newhall navel oranges. But he found that not many villagers took the initiative to consult and ask him for advice. Most of them only came to him to "ask for help" after their own attempts had failed, rather than carrying out care and prevention in advance.
In order to teach the villagers in a concentrated and detailed way the scattered "similar but slightly different" problems they raised in daily life, and to further raise their awareness of actively learning and using scientific planting and care techniques, Xiong Dedong set up free fruit tree cultivation and management training classes in the village, promptly sharing the experience he had summarized and the results of his research with the villagers.
"In rural areas, everyone is very busy and simply has no time to study. Dedong took the initiative to come to our homes and tell us that learning the techniques well would save more time and effort, not waste our work, and that if the fruit quality was good and the selling price went up, it would be more worthwhile than growing other crops. It was hard for us to refuse his kindness again, so we went out of courtesy. After going a few times, I felt he really was sincerely teaching us, and for free. Things like flower thinning, fruit thinning and pest and disease control were all taught to us by Dedong. He would often come to our orchards to demonstrate for us, talking for half a day at a time, very patient and meticulous, which made me admire him from the bottom of my heart." said Xiong Jie, a large-scale grower in Group 2 of Yangping Village.
Over several years, by mastering practical scientific care knowledge and techniques, the villagers followed Xiong Dedong in the fields, carefully carrying out every step of care for the fruit trees at important growth periods in different seasons, from fertilizing, pruning, flower and fruit thinning to pest and disease control. Everyone found that Newhall navel orange yields were higher, quality was better and income had increased. Yangping Village became a fruit village famous far and wide.
A guide on the road to moderate prosperity
In order to keep up with the pace of market change and development, Xiong Dedong began studying modern orchard management, insisting on regularly holding fruit tree cultivation and management training classes in the village, passing on modern orchard development trends, management models and labor-saving cultivation techniques to the villagers, and advancing the citrus industry toward large-scale and diversified development.
The villagers of Yangping Village grew fruit that consumers loved, but how to deliver the fruit to consumers amid a labor shortage became a new problem.
"Many young people in the village go out to work, and the elderly left at home have to pick the fruit and sell it too, and simply cannot manage. So I asked around and contacted merchants to come and buy it." At the same time, in 2013, Xiong Dedong established a micro-enterprise to purchase villagers' fruit, using the modern marketing model of "Internet + agricultural products" to provide a fallback solution to the villagers' sales problem. In 2014, he established a fruit cooperative, developing more than 80 member households, adopting modern management models such as "company + cooperative + farmer," further broadening market channels and increasing marketing and promotion efforts.
"On the one hand, fruit growers can harvest the fruit on the spot and sell it to visiting out-of-town traders, which can both reduce transportation costs and expand sales volume, reducing losses from preservation, packaging and transportation. On the other hand, fruit growers can also sell top-quality fruit to the cooperative at a price higher than the local market, and after uniform grading and packaging, it is shipped to markets inside and outside the province for sale, gradually forming a market channel for high-end products and branding." According to reports, through scientific planting and building a green pollution-free fruit brand, Yangping citrus has already been sold far across the country, and the wallets of fruit growers have truly grown fuller.
Xiong Dedong keenly seized business opportunities, using his own orchard for trials, calling on villagers to adopt a combination of retail and wholesale, and opening fruit-picking tours to the public, carrying out diverse marketing experience activities such as "Happy Picking" and "Happy Farm," allowing consumers to personally feel the joy of harvest and the fruits of labor while also solving the problem of difficult sales of agricultural products and increasing farmers' incomes.
It is reported that as of 2015, Yangping Village had 5,000 mu planted with citrus, loquat and other specialty fruits, achieving a total agricultural output value of 60 million yuan, with the villagers' per capita net income reaching 12,000 yuan. The rural ecological environment is good, and the farmer masses live in harmony and happiness.