The planting story of Kou Jincheng, a grower of "medicinal gold"

A few days ago, as soon as the reporter arrived at Koulou Village, Lidian Town, Sheqi County, Henan Province, the sound of many voices could be heard from the fields just across the road from the village. Looking out, dozens of villagers were busy working in the fields with great enthusiasm, six or seven agricultural tricycles were lined up in a row at the edge of the field, and a farmer with a dark complexion and an honest smile all over his face was directing seven or eight people loading things onto the vehicles.

"What I grow is called huangjiang, commonly known as huotougen. It is a precious medicinal herb. Besides cooling the blood and breaking up stasis, and promoting bile flow and reducing jaundice, it can also be used to extract saponin. It is known as 'medicinal gold'!" When it came to huangjiang, grower Kou Jincheng talked on and on.

Kou Jincheng is 46 this year, and his hometown is Madeng Town, Xichuan County. In the late 1980s, after graduating from a technical secondary school, he went south to work with dreams in his heart, and successively worked as an assembly line worker, security guard, and in mobile phone and medicine sales. After rushing about for more than ten years, he still had not saved much money. People around him said he was "not doing proper work," but he did not take it to heart.

"When I was young, I liked to be on the move, working everywhere and doing small business. Everyone said I was like duckweed on water, with my feet never on the ground." Speaking of those days of "not doing proper work," Kou Jincheng said sheepishly, "Later, when I went to Shaanxi and Sichuan, I saw many people growing huangjiang to extract saponin. It had already formed a scale locally, and the returns were very good, so I thought of bringing it back and trying to grow it in my hometown."

In 2004, Kou Jincheng returned to his hometown and began a new journey of growing huangjiang.

"Huangjiang is drought-tolerant and afraid of flooding. Back in my hometown, the land was yellow clay soil, and the soil quality was not quite suitable. It grew slowly and the yield could not go up. Although I planted less than 30 mu, the income still worked out higher than growing wheat and corn." Although the returns were not too high, Kou Jincheng still persisted in planting for six or seven years, until August 2011, when he moved with migrants from the Danjiangkou Reservoir area to Lidian Town, Sheqi County.

After moving to a new place and starting a new life, Kou Jincheng thought of no longer farming, so he went back to his old trade and started doing small business. But business was not easy. It was not only worrying but also did not earn him much money. During the Spring Festival in 2013, when people from his hometown came to visit relatives, they asked Kou Jincheng: "The conditions here are so good, why not continue growing huangjiang?"

One sentence awakened him as if from a dream. After observation, Kou Jincheng was delighted to find that the soil here was even more suitable for growing huangjiang than back in his hometown. "The land here has good aeration and high fertility. If huangjiang is grown here, the yield will definitely go up, and digging it out will not take much effort either." In the autumn of 2013, Kou Jincheng made up his mind to continue growing huangjiang. He made seven trips to huangjiang planting bases and research institutes in Hubei, Sichuan, Shaanxi and other places to inspect and learn. In 2014, he raised more than 1 million yuan and prepared to plant huangjiang on all of the more than 200 mu of transferred land.

Huangjiang is generally harvested once every two years, and no returns can be seen in the first year after planting. Over the course of a year, the farmers who transferred their land to Kou Jincheng each gained nearly 10,000 yuan in income, while the huangjiang, under Kou Jincheng's careful cultivation and management, also grew very well. According to his estimate, the yield per mu would be no less than 7,000 jin, so at the most conservative calculation, one mu could still bring in 12,000 yuan.

"This year's huangjiang harvest is abundant, and the villagers have all seen it. Many villagers have come to me, wanting to join me in growing huangjiang to become well-off. So far, about forty or fifty households have come to me," Kou Jincheng said. "Judging by the current market conditions, there is still a lot of market space for huangjiang, and I am willing to develop and become well-off together with the villagers." As of early March this year, Kou Jincheng had successfully transferred another 300 mu of land to expand the planting area, and more than 20 farming households had joined his planting team, bringing the total scale to more than 1,100 mu.

In order to help the newly joined villagers master planting techniques, Kou Jincheng took time to go to colleges and research institutions in Sichuan, Shaanxi and other places to seek advice from experts and professors, and had the "scriptures" he obtained printed and distributed to everyone free of charge. With the support of the local government, Kou Jincheng signed purchase contracts with pharmaceutical enterprises in Shanxi and other places, thereby ensuring the sustained development of the local huangjiang industry in production, supply and sales.