Walnut planting made his dream of prosperity in a mountain village come true

It is not easy to develop a small mountain village like this.

Gaojiazhuang in Puji Town, Jiaozhou City, Qingdao, Shandong Province is a reservoir resettlement village. Most of the village's land is mountainous and hilly, with thin soil, and it is sandy gravel soil, so grain crops fail nine years out of ten. To change the village's poor and backward appearance, Song Jianchun had worked hard to find a path for economic development since he became Party branch secretary of Gaojiazhuang Village in 2008. To this end, he went out many times to visit and learn, hired relevant experts for demonstration, and finally chose to plant thin-shelled walnuts in Gaojiazhuang and established the Gaojiazhuang Walnut Professional Cooperative.

Under his leadership, the cooperative members built roads and bridges, leveled land and improved soil, and with sheer determination planted 1,200 mu of walnut ecological forest on terrace after terrace. To better master the growth habits of walnuts, Song Jianchun organized cooperative members to visit and study in Jinan, Linyi and other places, participate in various forestry technical trainings, and invited experts from Qingdao Agricultural University and Hebei Lvling Company to provide on-site technical guidance for members in the fields. To broaden income channels, Song Jianchun, in light of the cooperative's actual situation, developed breeding in the forest according to local conditions, releasing 1,000 chickens and ducks per mu of walnut forest.

Walnut planting cannot do without scientific management.

For this reason, the Gaojiazhuang Walnut Orchard built a water storage pond with a capacity of 32,000 cubic meters, and all of it adopted water-saving irrigation technology, with a water-saving irrigation network reaching 1,600 m; built a 1,200 sq m comprehensive building for walnut storage and processing; and the roads in the walnut orchard were fully hardened, with a hardened area reaching 13,000 sq m.

In 2013, the "Gaojiazhuang Brand" thin-shelled walnut trademark, approved and registered by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, became a well-known distinctive brand far and near, and the cooperative also connected with several supermarkets and wholesale markets in Qingdao, making Gaojiazhuang walnuts a hot commodity.

After nearly 6 years of continuous effort, the Gaojiazhuang Walnut Professional Cooperative has 154 member households, and the walnut planting base has achieved an annual output of 90,000 kg and total annual sales of more than 3 million yuan. In addition to annual wage income of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan from walnut production, member households can also receive land share dividends from the cooperative, with each share yielding up to 1,600 yuan per year. In 2015, from walnut planting alone, the annual per capita income of the whole village reached 4,100 yuan, and the annual per capita income from under-forest economy reached 1,100 yuan.

At present, the Gaojiazhuang Walnut Orchard has become the "Western Development Modern Agricultural Science and Technology Talent Qingdao Training Base" and the "Off-campus Scientific Research Base of Qingdao Agricultural University", and is also the only high-quality thin-shelled walnut planting demonstration base in Shandong Province. The Gaojiazhuang Walnut Professional Cooperative has successively won titles such as "Shandong Province Forestry Leading Cooperative", "Qingdao One Village One Product Demonstration Village", "Qingdao Top Ten Forestry Leading Enterprises", and "Jiaozhou Safe and Reliable Agricultural Product Production Base". In 2015, Qingdao Gaojiazhuang Walnut Professional Cooperative was rated as a national forestry professional cooperative demonstration cooperative.