Self-taught expert leads villagers onto the road to prosperity
As the hot summer arrives, in the fields of Xijing Village, Xiaolou Town, the world-famous black-skinned winter melon has reached its ripening season once again. One after another oval, firm winter melons hang close to the ground on the lush green vines, neat and spectacular. In a melon field marked with a sign reading "Grafted Winter Melon Seedling Cultivation Demonstration Site," the reporter met Zhou Zhitang, whom the villagers call the "Winter Melon King."
Grafting winter melon seedlings onto pumpkin rootstock to increase the yield of black-skinned winter melon is a new technique that Zhou Zhitang is currently researching and promoting. Now that the melons have ripened, the new technique seems to have produced notable results. As Zhou Zhitang inspected the growth of the winter melons, he could not help but squint with a smile.
Zhou Zhitang, a native of Xijing Village, Xiaolou Town, currently serves as a member of the Party branch committee of Xijing Village, Xiaolou Town, director of the Second Cooperative, and chairman of the Guangzhou Zengcheng Lulanzi Vegetable Professional Cooperative. As a Party member, he loves the agricultural cause, continuously learns and explores, and is devoted to the application and promotion of agricultural technology, becoming an agricultural "self-taught expert" and "skilled grower" praised by the villagers. He keeps the villagers in his heart and selflessly promotes the cultivation techniques for crops such as black-skinned winter melon, Zengcheng late-season choy sum, and potatoes, leading villagers in Xijing, Dongjing, Lapu, and other places onto the road to prosperity. He is upright and honest, actively participates in village affairs management, and plays a vanguard and exemplary role as a Party member through practical actions, promoting the modernization of the village. Due to his enterprising spirit and selfless dedication, he has successively received honors including Advanced Individual in "Striving for Excellence" in Xiaolou Town, Leader in Science Popularization in Zengcheng District, and Model Worker at the Zengcheng District, Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, and national levels.
Keen to learn, he discovered the prosperity formula of "black-skinned winter melon"
In 1980, after graduating from high school, Zhou Zhitang went out to work in Nanhai, Foshan. Before long, Zhou Zhitang discovered that not far from where he worked there was a village mainly engaged in growing winter melon. "Back then I often ran to their fields and asked the farmers about cultivation methods. I felt it was worth a try and that it might bring good returns." In 1990, after returning to Xijing Village, Zhou Zhitang began experimenting with the "secrets" of growing winter melon. However, because the cultivation methods were not right and the winter melon varieties were of uneven quality, the melon flesh tasted poor, and his first attempt at growing winter melon ended in low yield and poor sales.
Zhou Zhitang was not discouraged. Full of confidence, he found the Guangzhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Under the experts' guidance and suggestions, Zhou Zhitang obtained a batch of high-quality black-skinned winter melons. Afterwards, Zhou Zhitang also learned from books that using artificial pollination could increase crop yields. This excited him greatly. "When the winter melons bloomed, I would go to the melon field at around three o'clock every day to pollinate the winter melons by hand," Zhou Zhitang said.
Hard work pays off. After many experiments, Zhou Zhitang's black-skinned winter melon yield increased by more than 50%. The winter melons were firm and sweet and were well received by the market. In 2000, he was selected as the agricultural technician of Xijing Village and began promoting black-skinned winter melon cultivation techniques to the villagers. "As a native of Xijing Village, I believe good things should be shared with everyone. It is not enough for one person to be a skilled grower; only when all the villagers become skilled winter melon growers can we successfully bring winter melon to the market and achieve common prosperity."
After that, Zhou Zhitang actively contacted experts and professors from the Guangzhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences, learned advanced cultivation techniques, held free agricultural technology training classes for villagers, and provided field technical services for farmers. Under his leadership and help, more than 300 households in Xijing Village took up winter melon cultivation as their primary industry, making it a widely known "Winter Melon Village." Xijing Village's winter melon cultivation also spread to nearby Lapu Village, Dongjing Village, Miaotan Village, and some villages in Zhengguo Town and Paitan Town. At present, Xiaolou Town's year-round black-skinned winter melon planting area has reached 13,000 mu, directly increasing farmers' income by more than 65 million yuan.
In 2003, at Zhou Zhitang's initiative, Xijing Village established the Winter Melon and Choy Sum Association, dedicated to helping villagers solve problems in the cultivation process, and black-skinned winter melon cultivation entered a more specialized stage.
Forging ahead, continuously improving cultivation techniques
With both the yield and quality of winter melon improved, how could the sales problem be solved? With this question in mind, Zhou Zhitang and several villagers went together to some large farmers' markets in Guangzhou to conduct market research. After a period of visits, Zhou Zhitang learned that the northern regions have more rain around the Spring Festival, vegetable yields there are relatively low, and many vegetable purchasers go south to buy vegetables that can be stored for a longer time and do not spoil easily. Winter melon was one of their choices.
Therefore, Zhou Zhitang found ways to contact vegetable purchasers in the northern regions, introduced Xijing Village's black-skinned winter melon to them, and personally took them to visit the fields. Because of advantages such as large size, strong growth, disease resistance, and high yield, black-skinned winter melon quickly entered the northern market. In 2011, Zhou Zhitang established the Guangzhou Zengcheng Green Basket Vegetable Professional Cooperative, actively exploring the "cooperative + farmers" model, enabling agricultural products such as black-skinned winter melon to be sold as far as Shandong and Zhejiang, and Zengcheng late-season choy sum to be sold in the Pearl River Delta and even to Hong Kong, China, Macao, China, Singapore, and elsewhere.
Once the sales problem was solved, new problems began to appear. Around 2010, Zhou Zhitang found that black-skinned winter melon cultivation began to encounter a "bottleneck." Due to declining soil fertility, winter melon production began to drop sharply. After exchanges and discussions with agricultural experts, Zhou Zhitang once again improved the techniques, introduced a batch of Dutch potatoes, and implemented crop rotation to improve soil quality and overall production capacity. In 2011, Xiaolou Town officially launched the "Zengcheng City Northern Mountainous Areas Promotion of Poverty Alleviation Winter Potato Planting" project, with Zhou Zhitang serving as technical adviser, promoting potato cultivation toward scale and specialization. At present, Xijing Village's potato planting area is about 1,000 mu, with a yield of 2,500-3,000 kg per mu.
This attempt opened Zhou Zhitang's path of exploring diversified planting. In the same year, Zhou Zhitang leased more than 100 mu of land and introduced more than 10 new varieties for trial planting, including fruit-type papaya, green jade small winter melon, and Chinese yam. All were well received by the market and continued to be promoted.
The achievements before his eyes did not make Zhou Zhitang stop. At present, Zhou Zhitang is cooperating with experts and professors from South China Agricultural University to promote a "soilless cultivation project" and continues to try improving black-skinned winter melon cultivation through grafting.
Keeping the purpose firmly in mind, sparing no effort in serving the villagers
As a branch committee member of Xijing Village, Zhou Zhitang always keeps firmly in mind the purpose of serving the people and does his utmost to provide services to the villagers. Every year, regardless of severe cold or scorching heat, he is always moving through the farmland, helping growers solve difficulties encountered before, during, and after production through technical services, experience exchanges, feedback, and on-site guidance, so as to increase agricultural output, improve efficiency, and raise growers' incomes.
After the village got a small broadcasting system, Zhou Zhitang also took on the duty of broadcaster. "Some broadcasters in other villages do not understand agricultural production and can only play pre-recorded promotional audio. In our village, Zhou Zhitang gives guidance based on local actual conditions and climate changes, which is more down-to-earth," Deng Guifang, a farmer in Xijing Village, told the reporter.
"Now food safety issues are receiving more and more attention. Once a problem occurs, not only is a brand ruined overnight, but consumers are also harmed," Zhou Zhitang said. Taking consumers' food hygiene and safety into consideration, Zhou Zhitang also pushed for the village to set up a vegetable pesticide residue and pest and disease detection station.
In addition to shining in the agricultural field he excels in, Zhou Zhitang also actively cooperates with the village's two committees in carrying out village affairs development. Starting with strengthening the leadership team, Party members, and grassroots positions, and with the support and help of higher-level Party organizations, he brought into the village two committees backbones who are in their prime and have a solid work style, prosperity leaders who have ideas and are willing to contribute effort, and college-graduate village officials who volunteer to settle in the village and start businesses. In order to reasonably distribute the land acquisition compensation funds for the "Xiaolou Resort" project, Zhou Zhitang repeatedly convened villagers of the cooperative to hold meetings to formulate a distribution plan, and personally led the land acquisition team to measure the acquired land area, going door to door to have villagers sign for confirmation and making public announcements, which promoted the orderly progress of land acquisition work in a fair, just, and open manner.