Several college graduates in Putian return home to pursue understory planting, leading farming households onto the road to prosperity

Spring is the season for sowing, but for Putian Licheng Lirongchang Biological Development Co., Ltd., spring is also the season for harvest.

These past few days, the understory planting bases of ecological agriculture cooperatives cooperating with Lirongchang, such as Xiaban Village in Xindu Town, Licheng, and Dingzhuang Village in Huangshi Town, have entered the harvest period. Every morning at dawn, local farmers busy themselves in the woods, picking the crisp, dew-covered stems of Dendrobium officinale (tiepi shihu) coiled around the tree branches and carefully placing them into baskets.

"This year is another bumper harvest year," said a farmer picking at the Huangshi Jinlong understory planting base. "We have to thank those college graduates Cai Weihuang, Xu Feiqiang and the others."

Setting up a "three-dimensional planting method"

Cai Weihuang, who graduated from an engineering college four years ago, had originally been working in engineering and construction contracting in Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and other places, earning more than 800,000 yuan a year. During the 2013 Spring Festival, Cai Weihuang returned to his hometown in Putian for the holiday and learned that longan prices were low, and many local farmers were unwilling to tend their longan trees, letting them grow wild. "The mountains and water in my hometown are good, and the ecological environment is excellent. Planting Anoectochilus roxburghii (jinxianlian) and Dendrobium officinale and developing understory economies should have very good prospects." Cai Weihuang conceived the idea of returning home to set up an understory planting base. He told this idea to his fellow townsman Xu Feiqiang, a graduate of Sichuan Agricultural University, and the two hit it off immediately. With the help of their families, they raised more than 5 million yuan by way of shareholding to establish Lirongchang Biological Development Co., Ltd., purchased laboratory equipment, built a tissue culture workshop, and leased more than 50 mu of land at the foot of Hugong Mountain in Putian to build an understory planting base.

For understory planting, the key is to master tissue culture seedling technology. To this end, they made a special trip to an enterprise in Zhangzhou for a half-month on-site inspection and study, and introduced 150,000 yuan worth of seedlings, planting them by "copying the gourd's shape." However, due to natural disasters and factors such as Putian's environment and soil differing from Zhangzhou's, plus insufficient planting and management experience, the seedlings were quickly lost almost entirely.

"These college graduates, giving up a stable income of several hundred thousand yuan a year, came back to be farmers, really." Many people did not understand them. But Cai Weihuang's family encouraged him: "It's normal to have some problems when you first start planting."

To overcome the technical difficulties of tissue culture seedlings, the two went to Fuzhou to visit experts from the Agriculture and Forestry University and the Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Under the experts' guidance, they mastered the principles of tissue culture, growth habits and key points of scientific management.

"The growing environment requirements for Anoectochilus roxburghii and Dendrobium are extremely demanding. Artificial cultivation must overcome the technical difficulty of variety stability to prevent variety degeneration," Xu Feiqiang said. After repeated experiments, they successively broke through technical stages in seedling tissue culture such as proliferation, differentiation and rooting. By the end of 2013, the base's artificial cultivation of Anoectochilus roxburghii and Dendrobium officinale finally succeeded. In 2014, they contracted more than 100 mu of land through land transfer to expand the planting base.

Dendrobium officinale and Anoectochilus roxburghii are extremely similar in many aspects such as growth conditions. Through experiments, they set up a "three-dimensional planting method," that is, "bionic" planting of Dendrobium officinale on longan tree trunks and planting Anoectochilus roxburghii in the tree shade. "Dendrobium officinale has a long growth cycle, taking about two years. This has raised the management cost of the planting base considerably. Three-dimensional planting is meant to increase land utilization and demonstrate agricultural benefits in the short term," Cai Weihuang said. The "three-dimensional planting method" is very effective. Longan itself has health-preserving and medicinal effects, and the Anoectochilus roxburghii and Dendrobium officinale planted around the longan trees can absorb part of the longan tree's nutrients to optimize their effects, resulting in better quality.

"This patch of wild-simulated Anoectochilus roxburghii and Dendrobium officinale is a treasure in the forest, as precious as gold." At the Dingzhuang planting base, cooperative head Zhu Guoming said that this understory planting base covers more than 60 mu. It used to grow longan, and one mu could bring in only more than 2,000 yuan a year. Now, with the "three-dimensional planting method," longan plus Dendrobium officinale and Anoectochilus roxburghii, income has multiplied several times over at once.

Winning the market with good quality

With tissue culture technology conquered and planting methods made scientific, the next step was to expand the planting scale, build a brand and break into the market.

Cai Weihuang said that planting Anoectochilus roxburghii and Dendrobium officinale requires high technical skill. Considering that most farming households cannot plant on a large scale on their own, they organized a group of villagers together and set up a cooperative. At the same time, they organized technical personnel to provide villagers with free guidance in each stage such as weeding and fertilizing, and provided free training to 400 villagers per year. "To ensure zero risk for growers, we also sell the cultivated seedlings to the cooperative and finally purchase and process them."

At present, through the form of "company (base) + cooperative + farming households," Lirongchang has developed 5 agricultural cooperatives, with a planting area of more than 360 mu, driving more than 300 farming households to participate in planting.

"Anoectochilus roxburghii and Dendrobium officinale are known as 'immortal herbs' and have unique health-preserving and medicinal effects. In recent years, more and more places have artificially cultivated these 'immortal herbs,' and market competition has become increasingly fierce," Cai Weihuang said. "In a price war, we have no advantage. Only by playing the quality card can we respond to low-price competition."

They have a clear positioning: where others have it, we make it better, and win the market with good quality. Therefore, from the start they chose "Fujian Anoectochilus roxburghii," which is difficult to cultivate but high in nutrients. The Dendrobium officinale they grow is never treated with pesticides and is an original-ecology environmentally friendly product; to distinguish it from other brands, they registered the "Hulan" trademark.

"Our customers are all over the country." Speaking of marketing innovation, Cai Weihuang said that from the beginning they abandoned traditional wholesale channels and marketed to target consumers through direct-sales stores. Later, Cai Weihuang's older brother Cai Weishan, a graduate of an institute of technology who is good at e-commerce operations, joined, opened online stores on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, and adopted an "online + offline" model, gradually expanding the market bit by bit from the Fujian-Guangdong area.

Last year, Lirongchang's revenue was close to 20 million yuan. "The base is bigger, there are more products, and we need to work on deep processing of products for healthy development." Talking about future plans, the young people are full of confidence. At present, they are starting research and development of products such as health-preserving tea and beverages, preparing to transform Chinese medicinal materials into high-value-added traditional Chinese medicine products, and using the base to develop picking-experience tourism.