One greenhouse, three projects, easily earn 100,000 a year
“This year I introduced ‘Chunyu Mingfeng’ silkworm eggs from elsewhere. The variety is of excellent quality, with stable high-yield performance and disease resistance. Silkworm breeding alone brings in more than 50,000 yuan. Add to that the income from growing oyster mushrooms and raising seedlings in the greenhouse, and the annual income is at least 100,000 yuan. One greenhouse really is worth 100 mu of grain fields!” Xu Shunqiang of Jiabu Village, Quanyuan Township, Tancheng County, Shandong Province, could not contain his delight when talking about his recipe for prosperity.
Xu Shunqiang, 45 this year, is an ordinary farmer. After last Spring Festival, with financial support from the local rural commercial bank, he invested 150,000 yuan to build a 5-mu winter-warm greenhouse. He devised his own “circular economy” method of planting and breeding, developing “three projects” in one greenhouse in a single year. With this “trilogy” for prosperity, his annual income exceeds 100,000 yuan, which is remarkable.
Sericulture was the first part of his trilogy for prosperity. When he first built the greenhouse, it was because the township was promoting a mulberry planting and silkworm breeding poverty alleviation project in the village, and the local rural commercial bank was responsible for providing 100,000 yuan in interest-subsidized greenhouse funds. Free of financial worries, Xu Shunqiang planted 8 mu of mulberry trees and began raising high-tech greenhouse silkworms. Because greenhouse sericulture saves labor and effort, is efficient, requires little investment, has low costs and produces quick results, and because he introduced superior silkworm eggs, Old Xu raised four batches of silkworms in the poverty alleviation greenhouse and earned a total of 50,000 yuan.
Growing oyster mushrooms was the second part of his trilogy for prosperity. In October last year, after the fourth batch of autumn silkworms was raised, such a large greenhouse sitting idle was truly a pity. When a credit officer from Tancheng Rural Commercial Bank made a follow-up visit to his prosperity project, he suggested using local discarded corncobs to grow edible fungi. Xu Shunqiang, with his business-mindedness, was quick to “catch on.” He introduced a new oyster mushroom strain and grew oyster mushrooms on more than 5,000 kg of corncobs. In just one idle winter season he sold four batches of oyster mushrooms, and by “mining gold from waste” he earned another more than 30,000 yuan.
Xu Shunqiang had tasted the sweetness of the greenhouse, but he was not satisfied. He then played the third movement — not growing vegetables but making money from seedlings. After selling the mushrooms following the Spring Festival, there was still a long stretch before silkworm rearing in May. Taking advantage of the favorable local conditions as a watermelon planting base, he used the greenhouse to raise grafted seedlings of a new watermelon variety and then sold them. With ready-made watermelon seedlings, melon growers can save themselves the many troubles of buying seeds, filling seedling bags, building seedling sheds and managing them, and the grafted watermelon seedlings solve the drawback of watermelon continuous cropping being prone to seedling death, so everyone liked to reserve seedlings from him. The more than 20,000 yuan in seedling income also went into his pocket.
Growing one mu of grain fields yields two crops a year, wheat and corn, with a net income of only about 1,000 yuan. One greenhouse, three projects, is worth 100 mu of grain fields! This is exactly it: cheap grain hurts farmers, and increasing income from farming is extremely hard; change your thinking, grow new varieties in planting and breeding, and the road to prosperity becomes wider.
Ni Zhigang