Zhao Zifeng: Selling agricultural products is also selling a lifestyle
After studying in Japan for five years, Zhao Zifeng returned to the rural northeast to grow rice. No chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, direct online sales, and an annual profit of more than one million yuan. When the surrounding farmers talk about him, it comes down to two words: admiration! Ordinary rice sells for one or two yuan per jin, but his can sell for nine yuan.
Why he decided to farm——a spark, the land, an ideal
Why he wanted to go home and farm came from the personal experience of someone close to him. A relative of Zhao Zifeng had their land expropriated, and the government gave a one-time compensation of more than 300,000 yuan. As it turned out, in less than a month, that more than 300,000 yuan was almost all spent! With no land and no money left, they had no choice but to go out and work, but at forty or fifty years old, who would still want to hire you? For all the long days ahead, they would have to worry about making a living. This made Zhao Zifeng feel that land is actually very precious, yet farmers who own land cannot see its true value.
So he made a bold decision: go home and become a farmer. Without telling his family, he quit his high-paying job at a Japanese company, returned to the countryside, and rented 40 hectares of wasteland, and saline-alkali land at that! This left the surrounding farmers completely baffled, and many said he was too foolish. But Zhao Zifeng did not see it that way. Wasteland where crops had never been grown meant zero fertilizer and pesticide residue. As for improving saline-alkali land, he had also found out a good method: use cow dung. Cow dung contains grass, and the grass is upright. By using cow dung plus a special technique for improvement, the soil can be made breathable and not compacted, and wasteland can absolutely be transformed into good farmland.
The journey was full of difficulties——doubt, abandonment, losses
Farming was not as simple as he had imagined; it was even much harder than he had imagined. He had thought he would grow organic rice without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, but unexpectedly the fields were overrun with weeds. He hired people to pull weeds, but as soon as one batch was pulled, another grew. Not only was the labor cost unbearable, but the villagers sometimes quit on him. The workers did not understand: if one spray of herbicide could solve the problem, why take the long way around and waste time and energy? On top of that, because he lived in the village every day to farm and was busy from morning to night, he had no time to accompany his girlfriend, and the girlfriend he had dated for 5 years wanted to break up with him because she did not understand. To make matters worse, the fact that he had been farming without telling his family also reached home, and his parents' heartbroken attempts to persuade him against it only added to his troubles. He began to doubt his original decision, or perhaps whether he had been too optimistic.
After that year, he had put all his mind into farming, and sales channels were still completely blank. The grain he harvested was half the yield of what ordinary farmers grew, yet the price was the same as theirs, and that year he had a net loss of 200,000 yuan.
After calming down, Zhao Zifeng still encouraged himself not to give up. Growing techniques and cultivation methods could all be improved by consulting experts, and if there were no sales channels, he would go out and develop them himself. In short, it was not yet time to give up.
Selling a lifestyle——photos, blogs, Taobao
The turning point came in a way Zhao Zifeng himself had not expected. At the time, he was writing posts on the Tianya forum, recording his rural life in the countryside with several large dogs, and many netizens were attracted by his “pastoral life” and wanted to buy his organic rice.
The life Zhao Zifeng chose might seem like a dream to many people. He used reeds that could be found everywhere locally to build houses, a large residence of more than 100 square meters with a ceiling height of five or six meters. He raised chickens, and by buying discarded particleboard used for packing parts, he could build a large chicken coop that was warm in winter and cool in summer for just a few hundred yuan. His daily life was “always balancing the relationships among all kinds of animals to prevent fights!” because he lived with three Alaskan Malamutes, one Samoyed, and one mixed-breed local dog. His entirely natural lifestyle and stubborn way of farming made people long for the taste of the countryside.
Just like that, taking photos and writing blogs became his important sales methods. He live-streamed on site every day, describing the chickens, ducks, and dogs here in a vivid and interesting way, like a movie, attracting more and more followers. Now Zhao Zifeng's annual rice income is more than 700,000, and cheese, honey, and eggs together add up to 300,000. The surrounding farmers now talk about him like this: “Admiration, we have to admire him. At first we also thought he could not make it work. But our rice sells for one or two yuan per jin, and his can sell for nine yuan. That won everyone over.”
Because of the emergence of new media, more and more products are not merely selling the product itself, but selling a lifestyle.
When customers recognize the seller and the product through a lifestyle, customer stickiness is extremely high, and it will form a fan effect. Your every move can become the focus of customers' attention, and everything in your life may also become a sellable product. Zhao Zifeng gained everyone's trust by recording his life and achieved product marketing. This is one corner of the agricultural industry, and it is an inspiration.
Making good products and adapting to new media sales methods will be an essential move for innovation in every field. Excerpted from Southern Rural Daily
Editor's occasional thoughts
Many people devote themselves to agriculture, but in fact they are discovering the value of land and rural scenery with a modern business eye. Growing agricultural products is sometimes like a craftsman polishing his own work. Treat the land with an honest and simple heart, and the land will also give you the return you deserve. Without good products, no matter how flashy the marketing, it can only be a fleeting show. Making the product well is the first step in agricultural entrepreneurship.
Some people like to talk about sentiments when starting a business, and agriculture is also a field relatively suited to expressing sentiments, because returning to nature and living simply actually fits the wishes that many urban people today can only imagine but cannot realize. Discovering the value of a lifestyle in agriculture is a cross-disciplinary vision. Some people, when they sell agricultural products, sell only the value of that agricultural product, while others tell you that this agricultural product embodies the nourishment of sunshine and rain and the nurturing of the land, and so this agricultural product takes on a different meaning. Infusing a lifestyle into your own products is a pursuit of small but beautiful things.