Tieli farmer Zhang Honghai achieves a three-step leap to prosperity

"The online market is really big. With a flick of the fingers, grain can be sold all over the country." Zhang Honghai, a farmer from Aimin Village, Nianfeng Township, Tieli City, was fiddling with his phone while making his own little calculations.

"At first my family often said to me, you're over forty and you fiddle with your phone all day long, can that put food on the table?" Whenever he recalls his family's lack of understanding from a while back, Zhang Honghai can't help but chuckle, "How could it not put food on the table? My Taobao shop and WeChat shop sold more than 6 tons of rice in just over a month after opening."

First leap: setting up a factory

When it comes to Zhang Honghai, he is well known throughout the Nianfeng Township area, recognized by everyone as a man who knows how to get rich. The Xianshanshui Modern Agricultural Machinery Cooperative he led more than 60 farming households to form has launched its own organic rice brand, "Yitie Jinhai Grain."

Zhang Honghai began farming at the age of 19. In 2003, he set up a rice processing plant, extending the industry chain and putting the profits from the processing stage into his own pocket.

Setting up the factory required an investment of about 300,000 yuan, but at the time he only had a little over 100,000 yuan on hand, so he raised more than 200,000 yuan from relatives and friends. In the first year, during the rice processing season, he worked day and night at the factory, grinding away for 4 months, processing 60 tons of rice a day. Because he had no sales channels of his own and just waited at home for customers to come buy, he earned only one or two fen per kilogram of rice processed. By the second year, after repaying the money borrowed to set up the factory, he still had a little surplus on hand.

In the third year, Zhang Honghai went out himself to find markets. He usually paid close attention, for example to bits of information gleaned from chatting with customers, plus customers' shipping locations and so on. As the information accumulated, he had a direction once he went out. He quickly established a sales outlet in Zhengzhou, and later gradually opened up sales in Beijing, Hebei and other places. Now he has built a sales network in 20 provinces and cities across the country.

At first, the rice he processed and sold was purchased in scattered amounts from farmers in the surrounding ten-li-eight-xiang area, so uniform quality could not be guaranteed. Zhang Honghai thought that to unify quality, production standards had to be unified and the production process strictly controlled, and forming a cooperative was a very good way out.

Second leap: setting up a cooperative

In 2010, Zhang Honghai founded the Tieli City Xianshanshui Modern Agricultural Machinery Cooperative, with 15 farming households joining initially. Before long, the cooperative's advantages became apparent: large-scale operation, standardized production, joining forces to brave the market... The cooperative's appeal and cohesion grew stronger and stronger. By 2015, its members had grown to more than 60 households, with intensive paddy field planting reaching 330-plus hectares.

From the very beginning, the cooperative set its sights on organic rice. After 5 years of development, by last year organic rice had grown to only 66 hectares. Organic rice has high planting requirements, but its added value is also very high. Zhang Honghai did the math: last year the cooperative's 66 hectares of organic rice produced 4,500 kg of organic rice per hectare, a yield 1/3 less than ordinary rice, but the price per kilogram of organic rice was 4 yuan more than ordinary rice. "Our price is very low on the market. The main reason is that brand recognition isn't high yet, so we earn a bit less. Even at this price, the overall benefit is nearly double that of ordinary rice." The cooperative's members, like Zhang Honghai, have all tasted the sweetness of organic rice and are even more motivated. "This year we'll add another 30 hectares." It turns out that growing organic rice not only has high operational standards; the cultivated land also needs to stop using pesticides and chemical fertilizers for several years, and only after testing shows that the pesticide and chemical fertilizer residues in the soil have dropped to meet the corresponding standards can it be used to grow organic rice.

Third leap: "Internet + organic agriculture"

The organic rice has been grown, but to sell it well, one cannot just take the old traditional sales path. How can a bigger market be opened? At the critical moment, the relevant departments of Tieli City extended a helping hand again.

"Last year the city organized us to go elsewhere to study, and it really opened our eyes. With the help of the internet, we opened up a bigger sales market." The Tieli City E-commerce Office helped Zhang Honghai find an e-commerce service company to take on the online marketing business. The WeChat shop and Taobao shop of the "Jinhai Grain Brand Market Store" went online together. Orders went from none to many, and repeat customers grew and grew. When communicating with Zhang Honghai, a consumer said the rice tasted quite good, but they hadn't seen the planting and processing process, so they were still a bit uneasy. Zhang Honghai immediately contacted an e-commerce operation enterprise to implement real-time IoT monitoring of organic rice production, so that consumers thousands of li away could monitor every detail of production around the clock.

Setting up real-time IoT monitoring required an investment of 170,000 yuan, which is no small sum, but Zhang Honghai said the money was well spent. "This year I still need to add some large agricultural machinery and tools. I've already prepared 2 million, and according to policy the state can match another 3 million. The 5 million worth of agricultural machinery and tools will be delivered to the cooperative before long, and then we'll be even more powerful."

With spring plowing production about to begin, Zhang Honghai still took things unhurriedly every day. Only after the reporter asked did it become clear that preparations for spring plowing had been completed well before the Spring Festival, just waiting for the farming season to arrive to start work immediately.