Li Wangrong: From a Hard-Won Startup to a "Leading Goose" in Getting Rich

Twenty years ago, he left his hometown and made a living by doing small business, his days passing without much excitement; twenty years later, with a farmers' professional cooperative and the "Heiliuzi" series of agricultural and sideline products, he lives in solid comfort and prosperity. He says: "One person being rich does not count as truly rich. Only by leading my fellow villagers to prosperity and giving them more to look forward to in life do I feel I have truly done something meaningful." He is Li Wangrong, founder of the Baotou Guangheng Farmers' Professional Cooperative. Now 49 years old, Li Wangrong has used hard work and wisdom to weather life's storms and set foot on the bright road to prosperity.

To Make a Living, Drifting from Place to Place

Liguangheng Village in Haye Hutong Town, Jiuyuan District, sits at the westernmost edge of Jiuyuan District, bordering Heiliuzi Township of Bayannur City. Twenty years ago, Liguangheng Village had backward agricultural infrastructure and basically "depended on the heavens for its meals." Crop yields were very low, and with a bumpy dirt road in the village, even in a bumper year it was hard to transport goods out. The villagers lived a life in which they barely had enough to eat. "To let my children receive a better education and let my family live better, I wanted to go out and try my luck." At the time, this was the choice of many villagers. "I worked as a migrant laborer elsewhere and ran a restaurant. It was hard work, but the income was not much. If you could live a good life in your hometown, who would be willing to leave it?" Recalling the past, Li Wangrong looks solemn.

Attached to His Native Soil, He Returns Home to Start a Business

While working away from home, Li Wangrong constantly thought about the development of his hometown, Liguangheng Village. Like Heiliuzi Township, this place has little rainfall, high evaporation, long sunshine hours, and large temperature differences between day and night, making it suitable for vegetables and melons to accumulate nutrients and sugar. Every July and August, it is the season when muskmelons and watermelons ripen. The muskmelons and watermelons here, just like those of Heiliuzi Township, are praised endlessly by all who taste them. In fact, on the one hand the melons here really are delicious, and on the other hand "things are precious when they are scarce": transportation here is inconvenient and there are no distributors, so the melons cannot be shipped out, and the villagers dare not plant on a large scale. Each household could only plant 2-3 mu a year and sell them themselves in nearby urban districts. Li Wangrong, who had some business sense, thought: could a platform be built to make it easier for the elders of his hometown to trade with distributors, so that they would no longer have to worry about not being able to sell the melons they grew? At the time, the state was promoting the connection between agricultural production and market demand, pushing forward the adjustment of the rural economic structure, and beginning to cultivate rural brokers. In 2003, Li Wangrong seized this favorable tailwind and began to return home to start a business, becoming a rural broker.

Setbacks in Business Only Strengthened His Conviction

At the beginning of his time as a rural broker, several tumbles nearly cut short Li Wangrong's entrepreneurial path. Some farming households passed off inferior muskmelons as good ones to distributors, causing the distributors to lose money, and this move almost cost him the chance to cooperate with distributors. Because he did not understand the laws of the market, nearly a thousand mu of tomatoes rotted in the fields, and the farming households lost their trust in him... These difficulties did not defeat him; instead, they stirred his fighting spirit. He guided farming households to learn knowledge of the market economy and constantly raised their awareness of the importance of good faith; he strictly controlled product quality, and once anything was found to be passing off inferior goods as good, it was refused outright; he learned to go online, followed the news, kept learning about market conditions, reasonably arranged the planting area of agricultural products, and broadened cooperation channels with agricultural product distributors. Hard work pays off. After painstaking management, in 2009, after six years as a rural broker, Li Wangrong established the Baotou Guangheng Farmers' Professional Cooperative, and on the basis of the cooperative he also established Baotou Guangzhong Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. Today, the cooperative's sales network covers all parts of the autonomous region as well as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, Guangdong and other places, with annual sales of agricultural and sideline products of 35,000 tons and sales revenue of 38 million yuan. In 2014, the company was also rated as a key leading enterprise in Baotou's agriculture and animal husbandry industrialization.

Leading Fellow Villagers to Prosper Together

From rural broker to head of a cooperative and then to legal representative of a company, Li Wangrong's business has grown ever larger, and today he has become a local "success." Yet, to keep young people who were once as confused as he was from having to leave their hometowns, he knows well that there is still much he must do.

"The brick house was built the year before last, and last year I bought a car. The days ahead will be even better." Driven by Li Wangrong's cooperative, 28-year-old Gao Dianyu, a villager of Liguangheng Village, is full of hope for the future. To keep more young people in the village, starting in 2015 Li Wangrong secured a portion of government support funds and built nearly 700 mu of cooperative demonstration base, including a watermelon and muskmelon seedling base, a wheat and post-wheat transplanted sunflower base, a new corn variety demonstration plot, and a demonstration plot for new grafted watermelon varieties grown from seedlings. By changing planting methods and using high-tech precision management, the demonstration base advances the market time of muskmelons and watermelons and improves the yield and quality of agricultural products, which can both reduce labor and bring greater economic benefits. In 2015, Li Wangrong also registered the "Heiliuzi" trademark for agricultural products, and is currently applying for "Baotou Famous Trademark" in order to further enhance the popularity and reputation of the agricultural products. In addition, he contacted agricultural experts to solve the technical problem of muskmelons not being easy to store, making full preparations for "Heiliuzi" muskmelons to enter a broader market. At the same time, he tried every means to expand sales channels, increase sales volume, and further increase farmers' incomes. At present, the cooperative directly drives 405 farming households, whose planting area totals 12,000 mu, with per capita income increasing by 4,800 yuan, while also radiating outward to drive 807 farming households and increasing these farmers' incomes as well.