Li Feng: The sweetest fruit is the one grown from the soil of your hometown
↑Li Feng opens the app on his phone to check the real-time conditions of the chicken farm.
↑With online orders increasing day by day, Li Feng opens the website to check the day's sales.
↑Looking at the well-growing tomatoes, Li Feng (left) has a face full of smiles.
"Go to university, find work in a big city." This is the dream of many rural children, and also the earnest hope most rural parents hold for their children. But Li Feng became the first "odd one out" in Lijiazhuang Village, Zhao County - after graduating from university, he succeeded in business in the city, then brought his capital back home to "take up farming." For his second venture he worked doubly hard, and after four years of striving he has now successfully driven several agricultural cooperatives, building according to plan a large complex of pollution-free vegetable greenhouses, a vineyard, and a free-range native chicken farm, providing work for more than 100 local surplus laborers. He has also leveraged his computer skills to vigorously develop the "internet plus agriculture" model, selling agricultural products from the production base to Beijing, Langfang and other surrounding areas, and even exporting as far as Russia, South Korea and beyond, leading the farmers around him to prosperity together.
A "Going back home to devote myself to agricultural production - this has been my wish for many years"
Li Feng is from Lijiazhuang Village, Hancun Town, Zhao County. At 37, he is not tall, thin, wears glasses and is not much of a talker. In 2002, after graduating from North China Institute of Aerospace Engineering, he stayed in Langfang City and founded an information technology company. "I studied computer science. Back in my sophomore year I did software and hardware business with a few classmates, so after graduating I went straight into the same line," Li Feng says.
Ten years of entrepreneurial life accumulated Li Feng's first substantial pot of capital. Smooth sailing in business did not make Li Feng relax in the slightest. Watching her husband bury himself in the computer every day, only his wife knew that he was not truly satisfied: "Him? He grew up in the countryside and is always talking about his hometown and the land. He may not have acted right away, but he's been holding in a fire all along..."
What his wife said hit right at Li Feng's worries. Every year during the holidays, when he returned to his old home and saw the villagers toiling away facing the yellow earth with their backs to the sky, he always felt an indescribable warmth. His hometown had plenty of farmland, but the vegetable-growing industry had low economic returns, and farming methods were relatively backward. Li Feng saw all of this. He sought out his good friend from middle school, Jia Yanfei, and talked about the dream he had held all along: building greenhouses and doing specialty cultivation. Jia Yanfei was an agricultural technician. At his old classmate's proposal he felt delight, but also a trace of worry: many villagers had built greenhouses, but they were not on any scale, and all were cold frames; Li Feng was a genius with computers, but clearly lacked experience in agriculture... Faced with all these concerns, Li Feng fell silent. The faint glimmer in his heart, appearing and disappearing, tormented him so much he could not eat or drink. "Going back home to devote myself to agricultural production - this has been my wish for many years. Backing off before I've even started is not my style. Since I've been longing to go all out, I can't be timid." The spark of dreams reignited in Li Feng's eyes, just as when he first started his business.
"Go to university, find work in a big city." This is the dream of many rural children, and also the earnest hope of rural parents for their children. But Li Feng became the first "odd one out" in the village - he succeeded in business in the city, and brought his capital back home to farm. His elderly father was the first to object; he could not understand why his son would not run his business properly in the city and insisted on coming back to work the land. For a time, the villagers also pointed and gossiped about him, and some even said he had "lost his mind." It took several days to bring his father around; after all, he was his own father, and the scolding turned into nagging out of concern for his son's running around. As for the neighbors, Li Feng decided to show them results.
At the end of 2011 and in the autumn of 2012, Li Feng began working hard to transfer and consolidate land resources, successively contracting more than 500 mu of land in the neighboring village of Yangjiazhuang, of which 340 mu was used to build high-standard solar greenhouses, and "Hebei Shenhua Agricultural Development Co., Ltd." was also successfully registered at this time. Everything is hard at the beginning; Li Feng took the first step without hesitation.
After more than four years of effort, the company has now driven several surrounding agricultural cooperatives, expanded its land area to 1,200 mu, and built 71 greenhouses.
Scaled operation, corporate management and mechanized operations seem to have changed overnight the way Chinese traditional agriculture is perceived in people's minds - that "facing the yellow earth with your back to the sky" way of labor: facility agriculture, leisure agriculture and green agriculture likewise have "the sounds of chickens and dogs within hearing distance," yet turn the countryside in people's impressions into a "hidden paradise" where you can pick fruit, fish and play.
The grand blueprint for building a new countryside is summoning and attracting thousands upon thousands of "educated youth" like Li Feng - idealistic, ambitious, knowledgeable and technically skilled - to "come from the countryside and go back to the countryside." Their purpose in going to the countryside is precisely to effectively use their new ideas, new knowledge and new skills to lead and guide the villagers out of poverty, cast off backwardness, and establish a new mode of production and life, living easier, happier and more affluent days. As people's lifestyles and dietary structures adjust and their awareness of safety and health rises, Hebei farmers must board the express train of "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integrated development," keep a close eye on the big market of the "urban dining table," and do a good job on the major undertaking of "internet plus."
Expert commentary
Fu Weimin, Chang'an Employment Bureau
B "No matter how great the difficulties, I cannot give up lightly"
In books and on television, people can see a venture go from start to success or failure in a single day, but real-life entrepreneurship is different; you must walk one step at a time, and to succeed you sometimes have to walk for several years. "Without going through painful transformation, you will never experience the sweetness of success." Li Feng's words are light and breezy, full of philosophy, but only he knows their flavor most deeply. Those repeated falls and repeated blows left deep marks in his heart...
Before building the greenhouses, Li Feng spent half a year investigating, traveling through more than half of China and gathering some of the latest technology and knowledge, then returned home to start building the greenhouses. While building them, he hired two planting experts from Shandong at high salaries to solve technical problems. Yet the strength of one or two people is limited after all, and Li Feng thought quietly: the gaps in technology and management were both great. He brought in Jia Yanfei as his technical manager, and also found respected elders in the village with skilled planting experience, providing technical support while managing the workers' operations, and the company slowly moved onto the right track.
In 2014, the Shenhua agricultural base had just gotten started, production operations had fallen into a rhythm, and its development was just beginning to show. Looking at the various crops growing well in the greenhouses, Li Feng's taut nerves relaxed a little, and he planned to return to Langfang to handle company business. Just then, a fierce wind came unexpectedly. The wind carried sand and stones like sharp claws, lifting the plastic film covering the greenhouses and wantonly ruining the nearly ripe fruit. The wind stung Li Feng's eyes and cut his heart as well. After the fierce wind, the crops in the greenhouses, due to the sudden change in temperature, wilted and dropped their fruit one after another; the whole base was a scene of devastation. Li Feng slowly crouched down and, with trembling hands, gently stroked the broken seedlings; the passion of his venture seemed to have been scattered to pieces by the wind.