Grape Village Chief: The Leader Who Plants Grapes in a Resettlement Village

Yang Guowen, 67, is the oldest village Party secretary among more than 60 villages in Hongsibao District, Wuzhong City.

From Tongxin to Hongsibao, Yang Guowen has worked as a village Party secretary for 30 years.

When the reporter met Yang Guowen, he was verifying the information of registered poor households. "The old secretary is very meticulous; he checks each poor household's information several times," said Li Xueming, the first secretary.

Zhongquantang Village's grapes are very famous, and Yang Guowen is also a well-known "grape village chief" in Hongsibao District.

Hongsibao's grape industry originated in Zhongquantang Village. In 2006, Yang Guowen promoted grape planting in the village. Over 10 years, the grape planting area once reached more than 8,000 mu, and more than half of the villagers became wealthy through grapes. "At most, one mu of grapes could bring in more than 10,000 yuan, and many villagers bought cars and built new houses," Yang Guowen said.

Yang Guowen deserves much of the credit for Zhongquantang Village's grapes developing to their current scale.

In 2013, Hongsibao experienced frequent extreme weather: a freeze disaster in March, a wind disaster in April, a hail disaster in July... Especially in July, a hailstorm damaged 6,500 mu of grapes in Zhongquantang Village, causing losses of 7 million yuan, and some villagers even had no harvest at all. At that time, nearly half of the villagers in the village planned to dig up the grapevines and switch to planting corn the following year. Yang Guowen and the village cadres worked household by household during that period until the villagers gave up the idea of digging up the grapevines.

"Farmers have a very weak ability to withstand risk; they need to have confidence in the industry's development." In August 2014, upon learning that policy-based agricultural insurance was to be promoted in Hongsibao District, Yang Guowen immediately contacted the Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau and the insurance company, facilitating the signing of Hongsibao's first agricultural insurance contract between the Jiameng Wine Grape Planting Professional Cooperative of Zhongquantang Village and PICC Property and Casualty Hongsibao Sub-branch.

In the autumn of 2015, the village had a bumper grape harvest, but sales problems arose. Yang Guowen went to the winery every day, and a month later, all of the village's more than 6,000 mu of grapes were sold. In the following months, Yang Guowen rushed around so that the villagers could receive their grape payments sooner. It was not until January of this year, after the winery paid all 18 million yuan in grape payments to the growers through the "one-card" system, that Yang Guowen finally breathed a sigh of relief.

Now, grape planting in Zhongquantang Village has achieved semi-mechanization from winter burial and soil removal to fertilizing and spraying. Yang Guowen loves to tinker, and invented a weeding machine and a spraying machine combining local and modern methods. Villagers who have used them said, "The machines invented by the old secretary are easy to use, and can compare with big machines."

A couple of days ago, the owner of a winery in Hongsibao came to Yang Guowen again, offering a high salary to hire him to jointly manage the enterprise at the winery, and Yang Guowen once again politely declined.