Growing and selling pears, each farming household earns an extra 5,000 yuan

“One mu of pears yields 3,000 jin, and at a rough market price of 3 yuan per jin, that is 9,000 yuan per mu; add the 300 small fragrant chickens raised under the pear trees, and after deducting all kinds of costs, this year's income should be at least 100,000 yuan.” Recently, in Sihe Village, Qitang Town, Bishan District, more than 1,000 mu of golden yellow pear trees were laden with fruit. Villager Zhang Anwen packed the ripe pears into boxes while calculating the income from his more than 10 mu of pear trees this year.

Sihe Village sits at the foot of Yunwu Mountain, with little farmland and many barren slopes overgrown with weeds, where even a moment of carelessness could easily spark a forest fire. Local residents once earned an average annual income of less than 5,000 yuan, but now it has passed 10,000 yuan.

It is understood that before 2008, Sihe Village had always been a traditional farming village, and more than 300 households at the foot of the mountain lived by growing corn, sweet potatoes and rice. In 2008, Bishan began building the core area of the 100,000-mu vegetable base in northern Bishan, and developed fruit tree planting and understory farming in the surrounding area. Seeing that opportunity had come, Zhang Anwen took the lead in encouraging everyone to make full use of the slope and ridge land to vigorously develop cherry, blood orange, pear and other fruit trees with relatively high economic value.

In 2011, Zhang Anwen's yellow pears first came to market. The fruit was large and full of juice, and sold for 3 yuan per jin. The pears grown on the mountain brought in more than 20,000 yuan that year. At present, yellow pear planting in the whole village has expanded to more than 1,000 mu, and pear sales alone have increased the income of local residents by an average of 5,000 yuan per household and more than 1,500 yuan per person.

As the area of economic fruit forests increases, how to standardize fruit forest planting and achieve standardized operation has become a question local residents are considering. At Zhang Anwen's suggestion, the village's fruit growers have respectively established a cherry planting professional cooperative, a pear planting professional cooperative and others, and next they also plan to raise small fragrant chickens.

Text by correspondent Lian Hongyu, Feng Sheng