Black peanuts in Lincheng County, Hebei become a wealth-building bean that boosts farmers' incomes

“Planting black peanuts really offers more promise than growing other crops.” Recently, Li Weijian, a villager from Lijiaping Village, Zhaozhuang Township, Lincheng County, Xingtai City, Hebei Province, said that last year he planted 8 mu of black peanuts. Although affected by dry weather, his net income still reached more than 10,000 yuan, which is more worthwhile than growing crops such as corn and wheat.

Li Weijian said that in the past, peanut planting was all done alone. Not only was the yield low, but the quality of the peanuts was unstable, and there was no guarantee for sales. Under the guidance of the Shijialan branch of the vocational education center, after joining the Guohua Black Peanut Professional Cooperative, experts from the agricultural school provided full-service support for peanut varieties, techniques, sales and more, and both quality and returns improved considerably.

Lijiaping is a mountain village with relatively high soil fertility and good permeability, suitable for the growth of cash crops such as peanuts. To improve the efficiency of peanut planting, the Shijialan vocational school branch led Lijiaping villager Wang Tianqun and others to Shandong to learn how to grow black peanuts and then promoted it to nearby villagers. Later, a cooperative was established to implement unified seed supply, unified management standards and unified buyback, solving the problem of connecting small-scale production with the large market. Last year, the cooperative achieved total revenue of more than 3 million yuan. The per capita income of growers was 30% higher than the local farmers' per capita net income.

Speaking of future plans, Wang Tianqun said that this year the cooperative plans to develop more than 100 new member households, bring the number of households to more than 500, and develop 5,000 mu of new black peanut planting bases, bringing the cumulative development of high-quality black peanut planting bases to 12,000 mu.

Wang Yongzhou, Guo Yanhong