Pepper cultivation gives farmers in Nanhe, Hebei a taste of prosperity
Recently, in Songzhuang Village, Sanzhao Township, Nanhe County, a poverty alleviation signing ceremony was held as scheduled. Yang Mengshen, a skilled wealth-builder from Songzhuang Village, personally handed pepper cultivation contracts to poor households such as Yang Xiangmin and Su Ziqiang, using a "base + farmer" model to support poor families in developing the planting industry and lead them out of poverty.
"Bokang Company signed a planting agreement with us, providing free seedlings, pesticides and technical guidance, and also promised to buy back the peppers at market price as a fallback. I did a rough calculation: after the wheat harvest, if all 7 mu of my family's land is planted with peppers, the net income per mu will be at least 2,000 yuan higher than growing ordinary grain." After receiving the contract, poor household Yang Xiangmin counted on his fingers and happily did the math for us.
Yang Mengshen is a well-known "Pepper King" in Songzhuang Village, with more than 20 years of pepper planting experience. He currently has a 500-mu vegetable planting base and also founded Bokang Vegetable Company. To extend the industrial chain, last year Yang Mengshen also started building a 3,700-square-meter pepper deep-processing factory, mainly processing chopped peppers and pickled peppers, with products sold as far away as Shanghai and Hunan. In early spring this year, Yang Mengshen also secured a large order for 500 tons of pickled peppers from a Japanese client and reached a long-term cooperative relationship.
"The base has already prepared 150 mu of new horn pepper seedlings. In about a week, the first batch of seedlings will be distributed free of charge to poor households, and technical staff at the base will teach poor households step by step the techniques of pepper seedling raising, transplanting, management and protection, and picking." Yang Mengshen said that if this year's trial planting succeeds, next year they will continue to support them in expanding production and influence and drive more fellow villagers to shake off poverty and become prosperous as soon as possible.
Since the beginning of this year, in advancing targeted poverty alleviation, Nanhe County has, for the 1,974 poor households identified through screening, adopted a combination of overall advancement and precision down to the village and household level, and determined the "seven major projects" of poverty alleviation through science and technology, finance, education, industry, entrepreneurship, classification, and cadres providing a fallback guarantee, and separately formulated feasible poverty alleviation plans. For poor households with a certain capacity for work but lacking funds or projects, financial poverty alleviation, industrial poverty alleviation or entrepreneurial poverty alleviation is implemented, providing support with funds and projects; for poor households formed due to excessive educational burdens, government agencies and units are organized to pair up and help them achieve entrepreneurship through vocational or higher education; for poor households without the capacity for work, including the widowed, widowers, orphans and the childless, cadres provide a fallback guarantee to improve their poverty situation, ultimately achieving the goal of lifting all 1,974 poor households in the county out of poverty by 2017.