Lingbao City, Henan: Making full use of every part of an apple tree

Part of the fruit borne on apple trees is sold as fresh fruit, while another part is processed into concentrated juice for export. Pectin can be extracted from the pomace left over from processing, and the branches pruned each year are crushed and used as a raw material for producing shiitake mushrooms... In recent years, Lingbao City in Henan Province has accelerated the full utilization of agricultural product resources, lengthened the industrial chain and raised added value.

Lingbao currently has an orchard area of 1.15 million mu, with an annual fruit output of 1.6 million tonnes. After years of development, Lingbao now has 6 fruit-processing enterprises above the designated size, with an annual fruit-processing capacity of 400,000 tonnes and a fruit and vegetable digestion capacity of 1.8 million tonnes, and has been rated as one of the national "Top Ten Counties and Cities" for fruit and vegetable processing.

Fruit-processing enterprises have provided a fallback for the development of the fruit industry and given fruit growers a "reassurance pill", while also driving the continuous expansion of fruit-planting area year after year. Every fruit-maturing season, every village in the city sets up fruit purchasing points, and major apple-producing townships and towns such as Yangdian, Yangping and Xiyan have all built juice-processing plants, which both reduces transport costs and makes it easier for fruit growers to sell their produce, increasing their income.

Using the large quantities of apple branches pruned each year, Lingbao has developed edible fungi. After more than a decade of development, the annual production scale has now reached 1 billion bags, forming 12 specialized edible fungus villages including Yangjia Village in Jiaocun Town, Gantou Village in Xiyan Township and Qiangjia Village in Yangping Town.

The growth in production scale and steadily accumulating experience have aroused the interest of outside investors in edible fungus processing projects. Investors from Fujian have successively invested in and built edible fungus processing and export enterprises such as Minqian, Hengjia and Jiafu. Together with the projects currently under construction in the Chengdong Industrial Park, including an annual output of 30 million bottles of shiitake mushroom sauce and 20 million bottles of canned shiitake mushrooms, the city has gradually formed a shiitake mushroom processing industrial cluster.

The agricultural product sorting and export project invested in and built by Minqian Company alone in Xiyan Township processes 3,000 tonnes of shiitake mushrooms, 800 tonnes of daylily and 80 tonnes of wood ear annually, with products exported to Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China and other countries and regions. In less than a year since completion, it has completed exports of 2,600 tonnes of shiitake mushrooms, daylily and wood ear, earning USD 39 million in foreign exchange, equivalent to 260 million yuan.

In addition to selling fresh mushrooms and processing dried mushrooms for export, the city has introduced the Xinke Food project, which processes 6,000 tonnes of shiitake mushroom sauce series products annually. Changsheng Company successfully developed ready-to-eat crispy shiitake chips in April this year, which are well received by the market and at the same time fill the gap in the city's edible fungus industry's lack of terminal products.

What to do about spent mushroom sticks, which both take up space and pollute the environment? Yangping Town used discarded mushroom sticks to build the Chaoyang Biotechnology project with an annual output of 100,000 tonnes of organic fertilizer, which handles 30,000 tonnes of discarded mushroom sticks per year and has an output value of 120 million yuan, achieving circular utilization in the ecological mushroom industry and helping with soil improvement and environmental protection.

The development of agricultural processing enterprises has also driven the continuous expansion of agricultural planting area and sustained increases in farmers' income. The Baolihao food processing project invested in by Spanish investors uses the abundant asparagus and fruit and vegetable resources of Xiyan Township to process 10,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 8,000 tonnes of asparagus annually. This year, the company also introduced new asparagus varieties from France and planted 500 mu locally, with returns expected to reach 10,000 yuan per mu after two years.

Relying on 300,000 mu of walnut orchards, the city has built the Yuanshan walnut deep-processing project, mainly producing organic walnuts, walnut oil, walnut snack foods, walnut kernels and other products. In April this year, the company invested 12 million yuan to plant high-quality walnuts in Yangjiahe Village, Zhuyang Town, achieving industrialized development under the "base + farmers + enterprise" model.

In addition, Lingbao jujubes produced in the city are processed into jujube tea and jujube slices, Eucommia ulmoides is made into Eucommia drinks, Eucommia capsules and Eucommia male flower tea, yellow peaches are made into canned peaches, and grapes are made into wine... By launching projects based on agricultural resources, the city's path of deep processing is growing ever broader.

He Yingjie, Wang Gaohong