The Wealth-Building Secrets Hidden in the Garlic Sprouts of Yongdeng, Gansu
Yan Ren, a farmer from Beitong Village in Datong Town, Yongdeng County, came to Lanzhou 20 years ago to start a business, and his vegetable wholesale business thrived. As his business grew, he returned to his hometown to start anew, planting garlic sprouts in the village and gradually leading the villagers away from traditional grain crops like wheat and flax toward higher-value cash crops such as garlic sprouts.
Diligent hands bring spring early, and the fields are busy with farm work. On March 18, before the Spring Equinox of the lunar calendar had even arrived, the villagers of Beitong Village in Datong Town were already busy planting garlic sprouts in the fields. Directing everyone in the planting was a burly middle-aged man - the "capable man" of Beitong Village, Yan Ren. In 1989, Yan Ren left the village to start a business in Lanzhou. When he first arrived in Lanzhou, Yan Ren worked at a vegetable market, and from then on his life became closely tied to vegetables. From working for others, to setting up a stall to sell vegetables, to vegetable wholesale, Yan Ren's business gradually grew larger.
When he first started in the vegetable wholesale business, Yan Ren, like everyone else, wholesaled whatever vegetable was profitable. Business is like a battlefield - things change in an instant, and one careless moment can mean total defeat. Yan Ren later realized that this follow-the-crowd approach was not sustainable; rather than dealing in many varieties, it was better to master one. Yan Ren believed that garlic sprouts are indispensable in Lanzhou beef noodles, that Northwesterners have a particular fondness for garlic sprouts, and moreover, he himself especially loved eating them, so Yan Ren set a precise direction for himself: focus on wholesaling garlic sprouts. Every year, Yan Ren's garlic sprout purchasing began in Tianshui and went through Dingxi and Wuwei all the way to Zhangye.
Over the years, as Yan Ren traveled far and wide for business, each time he returned to the village and saw that some villagers were still growing low-value wheat and flax on their own land, with low incomes and difficult lives, he - as someone who had come out of this land - felt deeply uneasy. Then something happened that made him decide to change himself and, at the same time, change the situation of the villagers.
One day in October 2013, while purchasing garlic sprouts in Gulang, some growers, anticipating that garlic sprout prices would soon rise, stopped digging up the garlic sprouts in their fields. Yan Ren noticed that snow was coming, so he raised his purchase price and rushed to haul away several truckloads before the heavy snow arrived, while the garlic sprouts left in the fields were all buried by the snow, causing the growers heavy losses. Through this incident, Yan Ren realized that if the garlic sprouts had been his own, or had been contract garlic sprouts, this would not have happened. If there had been a purchasing station in that area, with the dug-up garlic sprouts stored in a centralized place, the garlic sprouts would not have frozen and been ruined either. Yan Ren thought to himself that to prevent similar things from happening, he needed to seize the initiative in purchasing and innovate his methods. How could this problem be solved? Yan Ren thought of his own advantages and of Beitong Village in Yongdeng, which he knew best.
As a vegetable purchasing wholesaler, Yan Ren had advantages that ordinary growers did not. What ordinary growers can control is growing the vegetables as well as possible; as for where they are sold and at what price, they have no say. Yan Ren, however, controlled the flow and pricing of garlic sprouts within a certain range, which meant he had a certain degree of control over the end market.
From vegetable wholesale to vegetable cultivation, from starting a business away from home to starting anew back in his hometown. When he told the villagers his idea, many shook their heads: "Our ancestors for generations never grew garlic sprouts - can they even be grown?" Faced with this, Yan Ren was not discouraged; he decided to prove it to his fellow villagers through his own actions. He refused to believe the east wind could not be called back. In 2015, Yan Ren planted garlic sprouts on 20 mu of rented land, surrounded by neighbors' wheat and flax. Under everyone's watchful eyes, the lush green garlic sprouts grew to 1 m tall, and the income from one mu of garlic sprouts exceeded 10,000 yuan, while the neighboring wheat brought in less than 1,000 yuan per mu. Facts speak louder than words, and the villagers looked on with admiration and envy. This year, led by Yan Ren, the villagers of Beitong Village have been planting vegetables one after another, and the garlic sprout area alone has now reached more than 100 mu.