Mushroom cultivation benefits the yellow earth, helping farmers onto the road to prosperity

Walking into the Fujian-Ningxia Modern Edible Fungus Industry Demonstration Park in Changchengyuan Village, Pengyang County, the reporter saw that mushrooms were growing promisingly in one modern greenhouse after another. This park, which was invested in by Fujian Province with 2.45 million yuan and leveraged local investment of 16 million yuan, is the edible fungus industry demonstration base with the highest degree of modernization and the largest scale in Ningxia and even the northwest region. It has already built 1,600 intelligent temperature-controlled mushroom fruiting rooms, produces 15 tons of various fresh mushrooms daily, achieves an annual output value of 80 million yuan, and increases the per capita annual income of farmers in the project area by 3,000 yuan. Villager Duan Qiaoe used to make a living by farming and doing odd jobs, with limited income and a hard life. Now she works at Futai Fungus Industry Company in the industrial park, with a monthly salary of more than 2,000 yuan. She said happily: “My income has increased, and life is better too.”

Pengyang originally had no fungus grass; the fungus grass industry is the result of Fujian-Ningxia industrial collaboration. “The successful introduction and cultivation of fungus grass technology in Pengyang broke the traditional grain-based planting model in the Xihaigu region and opened up a path of high-efficiency agriculture.” said Li Shifeng, director of the Pengyang County Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau. In 1996, Fujian and Ningxia established a paired assistance relationship, and in 1997 Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University sent a fungus grass technology poverty alleviation work team to Pengyang County. In response to local soil and climate conditions, the experts and professors of the fungus grass technology poverty alleviation work team conducted repeated research and experiments and introduced products suitable for local cultivation. “Fungus grass technology is an industry with little investment, quick results, and high output rate. Farmers who operate according to the technical procedures can recover their investment and make a profit in the same year. In the second year, the input-output ratio can reach more than 1:4. A mushroom shed covering more than 120 sq m can bring an annual income of 4,000 yuan to 7,000 yuan, equivalent to the income from more than 20 mu of grain crops.” Li Shifeng said.

In order to reduce farmers' costs of cultivating fungus grass and accelerate farmers' pace of escaping poverty and becoming prosperous, in recent years experts and professors from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University invented a technology for cultivating fungus grass using abandoned cave dwellings. Farmers do not need to build greenhouses; they can cultivate using abandoned cave dwellings. This technology greatly lowered the threshold for the industry and promoted the large-scale industrial development of fungus grass in Pengyang. It is understood that Fujian poverty alleviation officials and experts and professors, together with local officials, cadres, and masses, also introduced rare edible fungus varieties, formed a cyclical production model of edible fungi with eight harvests a year, and explored supporting technologies for rapid cooling, preservation, and vacuum packaging, greatly improving the market competitiveness of the products.

Today, fungus grass cultivation has become the project from which the people have benefited the most among the Fujian-Ningxia paired poverty alleviation projects in Pengyang County. Moreover, fungus grass cultivation has also been promoted in other parts of Ningxia. According to statistics, over the 20 years of Fujian-Ningxia paired poverty alleviation collaboration, the Fungus Grass Research Institute of Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University has successively sent 15 batches and 205 technicians to Ningxia to teach fungus grass technology, developed 17,000 mushroom-growing households, cultivated 17,000 mushroom sheds, driven an average income increase of 8,000 yuan per household, and increased employment by 22,800 people.