Fengkai's Mo Yanjiao: A Woman Entrepreneur's Path from Teacher to Farmer

In He'erkou Town, Fengkai County, there is a widely known woman entrepreneur - Mo Yanjiao. Once a teacher, she has been devoted to agriculture for 16 years now, leading farmers in the mountainous area to "mine gold" in the fruit and vegetable industry. On the road of fruit and vegetable cultivation, production, processing, and new product research and development, she has kept experimenting and innovating boldly, with abundant results. Recently, a reporter interviewed this woman entrepreneur in Fengkai County.

Resigning to Start a Business and Devoting Herself to the Fruit and Vegetable Industry

In 1999, when she was still a teacher, she contracted the green plum orchard belonging to Wenfeng Primary School in He'erkou Town, and made a profit of 10,000 yuan the next year. For her at that time, when she was earning a monthly salary of more than 300 yuan, this income was no small sum. "At that time, not many people in the county grew sugar mandarins," Mo Yanjiao said. "But starting a business always requires some spirit of adventure." After investigation and analysis in many aspects, in 2001, Mo Yanjiao and her husband rented more than 20 mu of land and invested all their savings in sugar mandarin cultivation. In 2004, the fruit trees bore fruit for the first time and made a profit of more than 30,000 yuan. Mo Yanjiao once again enjoyed the sweetness of earning income through agriculture.

In 2005, with the encouragement and support of her husband Huang Lan, Mo Yanjiao transferred more than 100 mu of mountain land and successively planted more than 5,000 trees of honey mandarins, sugar mandarins, and emperor mandarins. Because a hundred-mu orchard required more time for management, the couple made up their minds to resign from their teaching jobs, devote themselves wholeheartedly to agriculture, and begin their "sweet career."

Taking the Road to Prosperity Without Forgetting Her Fellow Villagers

In 2004, having tasted the sweetness of fruit cultivation for the second time, Mo Yanjiao also led surrounding farmers to plant citrus. Whatever methods and techniques farmers came to ask for help with, Mo Yanjiao taught and guided them patiently without reservation. Over several years, more and more farmers, driven by her example, began planting citrus.

"If agricultural products want to be competitive, besides good quality, they must also have their own brand, using a brand strategy to drive benefits and competitiveness!" Mo Yanjiao said. As the local citrus industry continued to develop, competition also became increasingly fierce. At the end of 2008, Mo Yanjiao led the establishment of the Jukang Citrus Cooperative, providing cooperative members with technical guidance, agricultural materials delivery, and purchasing and sales agency services. In 2011, Mo Yanjiao established two more production lines integrating preliminary citrus processing, preservation, polishing, and waxing, and built more than 2,000 sq m of factory sheds, expanding the citrus industry and also bringing employment opportunities to local farmers. The "Jukang" brand also became more and more well known. The Jukang Citrus Cooperative successively received the honorable titles of provincial-level demonstration cooperative and national-level demonstration cooperative in 2012 and 2014.

Fearing No Difficulties, Diversifying Cultivation and Boldly "Touching the Internet"

Just when Mo Yanjiao's citrus business was booming, citrus huanglongbing caused many fruit trees to suffer. When some fruit growers in the county were cutting down and abandoning trees, Mo Yanjiao instead invested more than 20,000 yuan to build a virus-free seedling nursery, cultivating sugar mandarin seedlings in modern greenhouse sheds. "We cannot just sit and wait for death," Mo Yanjiao said, pointing to the vigorous seedlings in the nursery.

While fighting huanglongbing, Mo Yanjiao also began thinking about how to make the mountainous land produce maximum benefits. Therefore, Mo Yanjiao and her husband Huang Lan decided to diversify cultivation while expanding the planting scale, and to establish a professional agricultural company to develop modern specialty agriculture. In the first half of 2015, after field investigations elsewhere, Mo Yanjiao and her husband found that purple jade yam had high nutritional value and good market prospects, so they decided to focus on developing purple jade yam. In April, they planted 35 mu and signed purple jade yam planting contracts with more than ten farming households.

In December 2015, the couple established Fengkai County Lufengrun Agriculture Co., Ltd., developing modern agriculture with the model of "company + cooperative + base + farming households." It has five cooperatives under it, with more than 500 member households and driving more than 2,000 farming households. It mainly cultivates specialty agricultural products such as purple jade yam, citrus, Qilin plum, oil chestnut, fiberless arrowroot, and purple sweet potato, with a planting area of more than 5,000 mu. In the same year, the Fengkai County Lufengrun Modern Agricultural Fruit and Vegetable Base was rated by the municipal women's federation as one of the city's ten "2015 Zhaoqing Women's Entrepreneurship Demonstration Bases."

From teacher to farmer, and from farmer to company director, Mo Yanjiao said, "My bond with the land of Fengkai is growing deeper and deeper." Standing on the land of Fengkai, her steps have also grown bigger and faster. She said she hopes to use three to five years to establish an agricultural e-commerce platform, realize linkage between agriculture and supermarkets, agriculture and businesses, agriculture and schools, and agriculture and enterprises, and let Fengkai's specialty agricultural products emerge from the mountains.