Overseas female translator returns home to help her in-laws grow pears

Zheng Haiou and her husband tending fruit trees in the pear orchard.

In just over 10 more days, the golden pears will be ripe. Zheng Haiou estimates that this year's output will be 50 percent more than last year, reaching 500 tons. A few years ago, her father-in-law Gao Shanfeng would certainly have worried about how to sell so many pears, but this year, before the pears even hit the market, a foreign trade company has already reserved 300 tons.

Zheng Haiou said: "They wanted even more, but I didn't dare sell them all, because there are other customers waiting."

This golden pear orchard represents half a lifetime of hard work by Zheng Haiou's father-in-law, Gao Shanfeng. In 2002, Gao Shanfeng invested 2 million yuan to set up the first golden pear production cooperative in Fangcheng County, Nanyang City, Henan Province. By around 2014, the golden pear orchard had reached a scale of more than 500 mu, with an annual output of more than 300 tons.

As the golden pear business grew bigger and bigger, Gao Shanfeng's health gave out. In 2007, he was hospitalized for more than 20 days due to acute myocardial infarction, and after 2010 he developed insufficient blood supply to the brain. Worried about her father-in-law Gao Shanfeng's health, Zheng Haiou gave up her translation job abroad in 2014 and returned to her hometown with her husband Gao Aoming to grow golden pears together.

At first, her father-in-law Gao Shanfeng did not agree. He felt that no matter how well the cooperative was run, they were still farmers in the end. He said: "You two are both university graduates. How can you give up good jobs to do farm work with your faces to the soil and your backs to the sky?" Gao Shanfeng also had an unspoken worry: "Young people today have been spoiled since childhood. Can they endure this kind of hardship?"

But Zheng Haiou was very firm: "My parents-in-law are getting older and in poor health, and we can't feel at ease being away." She and her husband were also very optimistic about the prospects of the golden pear industry and wanted to help the family make the current business bigger and stronger.

Zheng Haiou graduated from Shijiazhuang Foreign Language Translation Vocational College (now Hebei Foreign Studies University - reporter's note). Before 2014, she worked at a foreign company in Shanghai and was sent by the company to South Africa as a French translator, with an annual salary of 300,000 to 400,000 yuan. Her husband Gao Aoming also had a stable job at Shijiazhuang Army Command College. After returning to their hometown, the couple's skills were of no use, and they had to learn planting techniques from scratch.

"At that time, we stayed in the fields every day, learning from Father and the experienced workers." Zheng Haiou said that in order to master golden pear cultivation techniques as quickly as possible, she and her husband entered the pear orchard at 6 a.m. every day and usually stayed all day, eating lunch in the small house beside the orchard. In summer, the temperature was usually above 35°C, and the orchard was even more stiflingly hot, with sweat often soaking through their clothes.

"When the two of them came back, they were both fair and delicate, and before long they were tanned dark." Seeing her son and daughter-in-law working so hard, Gao Shanfeng could not help feeling distressed, but from then on he also stopped worrying that they could not endure hardship.

In addition to learning from her father-in-law and the experienced workers, Zheng Haiou often carried books on pear cultivation into the orchard. The workers joked: "A university graduate still needs books to grow trees." But Zheng Haiou had her own ideas: "The workers all rely on experience to grow trees, but experience cannot solve every problem. Only by combining theory with experience can we grow good pears."

Relying on this tenacity, in less than two months Zheng Haiou and her husband had thoroughly figured out the orchard's cultivation techniques. Now, if there is a problem with a pear tree, whether it is disease or pest damage, Zheng Haiou can stand under the tree, take one look, and make a pretty accurate guess.

After mastering cultivation techniques, the couple introduced a scientific management system and installed a monitoring system in the golden pear base. People in the office can monitor the growth of every tree and every pear, and have a thorough knowledge of air temperature, humidity, pear tree nutrients, pollination periods and so on. Moving from extensive management to refined management, golden pears improved greatly in both yield and quality. In 2015, her family's golden pear orchard output increased by a net 50 percent, and sales reached 6.83 million yuan.

"Before we came back, my parents did not understand e-commerce and relied only on traditional storefront sales. Now that we are back, we must seize the online sales channel." Zheng Haiou said that changing the single sales model was also one of her goals. In 2014, after Zheng Haiou returned to her hometown, she studied cultivation techniques while also promoting golden pears online.

Now they not only have the official website of the golden pear production cooperative, but also several e-commerce platforms. In 2015, e-commerce revenue alone reached more than 2 million yuan.

"Modern people care about eating healthily and with peace of mind. We should show the quality of the pears to consumers in the most intuitive way." Every pear sold by Zheng Haiou's family has a QR code on its packaging. By scanning the code, consumers can view in real scenes the entire process of fruit tree cultivation, pear harvesting and transportation.

Through innovative thinking and improved technology, Zheng Haiou and her husband have made the golden pear business bigger and stronger step by step. Last year, her family's golden pears had already gone abroad, selling as far as South Africa and other countries. This year, with half a month still to go before the fruit ripens, the cooperative has already received an order for 300 tons from a foreign trade company.

Zheng Haiou not only works hard to run her own golden pear orchard, but also provides saplings to farmers in many surrounding places such as Xichuan, Xixia and Nanzhao, and offers help and guidance during the farmers' later planting process. Last year alone, the cooperative provided more than 500,000 saplings to farmers from other places.

Zheng Haiou said: "I hope that through our efforts, we can drive the development of the golden pear industry in Fangcheng County and help farmers get rich together."