Zhou Jiang, a leader in returning home to grow flowers, cultivates a bright future
A few days ago, the reporter came to the greenhouse flower planting base in Xizhangzhai immigrant community, Taoying Township, Dengzhou City, Henan Province. Compared with outdoors, the inside of the greenhouse felt especially warm, with gerbera daisies and lilies of all colors blooming brilliantly, making it a dazzling sight.
Seeing the reporter approach, Zhou Jiang, who was busy among the flowers in the greenhouse, stopped the work in his hands. This 42-year-old middle-aged man is exactly the flower-growing leader of the immigrant community.
Starting in early last year, Zhou Jiang began returning home to develop greenhouse flower cultivation. At present, he is not only well known near and far within the community, but has also led nearby villagers to find a new path to prosperity through specialty cultivation.
"I quit my job and returned to the village to develop flower cultivation. When I made this decision, everyone thought I was joking!" Zhou Jiang said with a smile. Having finally found a stable job in a big city, suddenly choosing to return to the countryside for development was obviously contrary to common sense.
Since 2014, in his spare time outside work, Zhou Jiang discovered that in big cities, whether for weddings and funerals, shop openings, or visiting patients, large quantities of fresh flowers are used. After discovering this business opportunity, he thought that if he grew fresh flowers himself to sell, then not only could the idle land at home be put to reasonable use, but the income would certainly be no less than working as a migrant worker.
In order to reduce investment risk, Zhou Jiang did not blindly launch a project. Instead, he wanted to first go out and test the path and look for sales channels. For this reason, he went many times to Wuhan, Xi'an, Zhengzhou and other places to investigate the flower market conditions elsewhere. "In the flower market, a kind person reminded me that finding someone to cooperate with is not as good as opening my own flower shop to sell," Zhou Jiang told the reporter.
Afterward, after Wang Qian, deputy township head of Taoying Township and the area-responsible cadre of the Xizhangzhai immigrant community, learned of Zhou Jiang's idea, he actively helped him coordinate land and secured from the county immigration bureau a project for counterpart support of immigrant development. In the end, the county immigration bureau allocated special funds and helped him build 6 flower cultivation greenhouses free of charge, with the flower planting area reaching 6 mu.
In March last year, Zhou Jiang air-freighted seeds of fresh flowers such as gerbera daisies, lilies and lavender from Yunnan and tried planting them in the greenhouses. Because he managed them well and invested sufficiently, the flowers he planted soon reached the "age" to be "married off." By mid-July, all the fresh flowers in Zhou Jiang's 6 greenhouses had entered the peak picking season. According to the flowering period, they could be picked 15 times a month, and each greenhouse brought in nearly ten thousand yuan a month.
"Now I have established my own company. The fresh flowers are very popular in the Wuhan market, sales channels have been opened, and a large number of customer orders have been won. Next, I want to expand the scale of flower planting, expand to 18 greenhouses, and also open branch stores in Zhengzhou and Xi'an," Zhou Jiang then told the reporter.