Strawberry Queen Grows Ten Million Seedlings a Year, Helping Over 300 Villager Households prosper
Xinyi City in Jiangsu Province has four distinct seasons and fertile soil, making it extremely suitable for growing strawberries. Zhang Hongmei is a native of Xinyi City. To change the impoverished situation of her family and hometown, she resolutely returned to her hometown to devote herself to agriculture. Relying on the area's superior natural conditions and its many years of strawberry-growing tradition, Zhang Hongmei believed that growing strawberries was a path out of poverty toward prosperity.
After returning home, Zhang Hongmei contracted 100 mu of land in the first phase and established the Laowu Strawberry Ecological Park to begin growing strawberries. She insisted on scientific and ecological planting and management, and the ecological park soon achieved good economic returns.
In order to lead the villagers of her hometown to prosper together, she decided to take in more than 50 villager households and established the Laowu Strawberry Professional Cooperative in February 2010. Over the following years, she used her professional knowledge and, through her own unremitting efforts, grew the cooperative's business larger and larger, also driving up the incomes of her hometown's villagers. At present, not only does she herself earn an annual income of over one million yuan, but under her leadership the surrounding villagers have built more than 1,000 strawberry-growing greenhouses, indirectly helping over 300 villager households prosper together, with average household income reaching more than 40,000 yuan. She herself has won the recognition and praise of the people of her hometown and is hailed as Xinyi City's youngest leader in getting rich, and her deeds have received high praise from Vice Mayor Li Cheng of Xinyi City and extensive coverage by media at the Jiangsu provincial, city and district levels.
A chance opportunity brought Zhang Hongmei into contact with Yimutian, a professional agricultural products e-commerce platform, which helped her check market conditions in various places promptly and quickly, connect with buyers from various regions, and solve the problem of selling agricultural products.
Today, under Zhang Hongmei's leadership, the Laowu Strawberry Professional Cooperative is developing by leaps and bounds. Among its operations, the nursery center is specifically responsible for introducing, cultivating and promoting new strawberry varieties. Its seedling base is made up of more than 20 highly skilled strawberry growers, and cooperative members specialize in cultivating strawberry seedlings, introducing high-quality virus-free seedlings from the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Hangzhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The varieties include Hongyan, Zhangji, Falandi, Sweet Charlie, Banana Strawberry, Miaoxiang, White Strawberry (Jingjiao Xiaobai) and more. This year, the Laowu Strawberry seedling base has cooperated with a Japanese strawberry research institute and introduced varieties including: New Improved Hongyan, New Improved Zhangji, Extra-Large Strawberry, First Love (white strawberry), Angel's Love (white strawberry), White Komachi (white strawberry), and also introduced a new variety from South Korea, Christmas Red.