A young man who returned from overseas leases wasteland to grow rice, selling it for 9 yuan per jin

After studying in Japan for five years, Zhao Zifeng returned to a rural village in Northeast China to grow rice. No chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, direct online sales - a profit of over one million yuan every year. The surrounding farmers talk about him: Admirable! Our rice sells for one or two yuan per jin, but his can sell for nine.

Why he decided to farm

A trigger, the land, an ideal

Zhao Zifeng's relatives had their land expropriated, and the government gave them a one-time compensation of over 300,000 yuan. As it turned out, within less than a month, that 300,000-plus yuan was almost all spent! With no land left and the money gone too, 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 the farmers who own land cannot see its true value.

So he made a bold decision: to become a farmer. Without telling his family, he quit his high-paying job at a Japanese company and went back to the countryside to lease 40 hectares of wasteland - and it was saline-alkali land, no less! This left the surrounding farmers completely baffled, and many said he was too foolish. But in Zhao Zifeng's eyes it was perfect, because its fertilizer and pesticide residue was zero. As for reclaiming saline-alkali land, he had also found out a good method: using cow dung. Cow dung contains grass, and the grass is propped up inside. Using cow dung together with a special technique for improvement can make the soil breathable and prevent it from hardening, so that things can be grown.

The journey was full of difficulties

Doubt, abandonment, losses

But he never expected farming to have so many difficulties. He had thought that growing organic rice without pesticides or chemical fertilizers should be easier, but unexpectedly the fields were overrun with weeds. He hired people to pull the 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, and he kept arguing with them over this. They simply could not understand why he would spend 10 times the money to solve something that 200 yuan could take care of.

On top of that, because he lived in the village every day to farm and was busy running around, he had no time to keep his girlfriend company, and his girlfriend of 5 years wanted to break up with him because she did not understand. To make matters worse, the fact that he had been farming behind his family's back also reached his family, and his parents' heartbroken attempts to persuade him to stop only made him feel worse. After this year, having put all his thoughts into farming, his 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 for the year he posted a net loss of 200,000 yuan.

Even with the losses, he never thought of giving up. Growing good things naturally costs more, so he could only change the way he sold them, not the way he grew them. As for how to change it, he had not figured that out either.

Selling a lifestyle

Photos, blogs, Taobao

One day an opportunity suddenly appeared. When he wrote posts on the Tianya forum recording his rural life in the countryside with several big dogs, many netizens wanted to buy his rice.

The life Zhao Zifeng chose might seem like a dream to many people. He used the reeds that could be seen everywhere locally to build a house - a large residence of over 100 sq m with a ceiling height of five or six meters, which astonished the whole of Longwang Township. He raised chickens, buying discarded particleboard used for packaging parts, and with just a few hundred yuan he could build a large chicken coop that was warm in winter and cool in summer. His daily life, in his wife's words, was "always balancing the relationships among the various animals to prevent bloody fights!" because he lived together with three Alaskan Malamutes, one Samoyed, and one mixed-breed native dog. And this wife, "Bubu," actually married him and got the certificate with him after only 25 days of meeting him! But what spread most widely locally was still his stubborn way of growing things.

And so, taking photos and writing blogs became his important sales tools. The environment he lived in became the ammunition for online sales. Every day he was livestreaming on the spot, describing the chickens, ducks, and dogs here in a vivid and interesting way, like a movie, attracting more and more onlookers. Now Zhao Zifeng's annual rice income is over 700,000 yuan, and cheese, honey, and eggs together bring in 300,000 yuan. The surrounding farmers now talk about him like this: "Admirable, absolutely admirable. At first we also thought he could not pull it off. But our rice sells for one or two yuan per jin, and his can sell for nine - that is what convinced everyone."

Because of the rise of new media, more and more products are not just 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 forms a fan effect. Your every move can become the focus of customers' attention, and everything in your life can also potentially become a sellable product. Zhao Zifeng used the method of documenting his life to gain everyone's trust and achieve product marketing. This is one corner of the agricultural industry, and it is a revelation.

Making good products and adapting to new media sales methods will be an essential move for innovation in every field.