3000 women from Gucheng team up to grow yams in Zhongxiang, with both output and prices rising

A "women's team" made up of more than 3,000 women of childbearing age traveled from Gucheng to Zhongxiang to seek their fortune. They use clever methods to earn money on transferred land, running 20,000 mu of yams in a thriving business. In the cooperative, households worth over a million yuan are everywhere, and building Western-style houses and buying cars is nothing unusual.

Gucheng's capable women transfer land to grow yams

The core figure of this "women's group" is Liu Heying, a capable woman who has grown yams for more than twenty years.

Liu Heying, 43 this year, lives in Liuzhou Village, Lengji Town, Gucheng County. Liuzhou Village is located on the west bank of the Han River downstream of Danjiangkou, and its more than 5,000 mu of gray sandy shoal land is very suitable for yam growth. In 1995, Liu Heying returned home to grow yams, but after a year of hard work, each mu of yams could earn only more than 1,000 yuan, which always made Liu Heying feel "unsatisfied."

Because yams cannot be grown on the same land repeatedly, Liu Heying and her family moved successively to Xiangyang and Laohekou in the province, Weinan and Xiaoyi in Shaanxi, and Qinyang and Wuzhi in Henan and other places to seek room for development. In the spring of 2000, after making inquiries, Liu Heying and several sisters who grew yams came to Wolong Town in Xiangyang, and they felt they had "found a treasured place for growing yams."

They transferred land from local farmers at a price of about 3,000 yuan per mu. Output and returns doubled compared with growing on their own land at home. Each of the several women who initially partnered with Liu Heying gradually expanded from 10 mu to 20 mu, and now maintains about 100 mu each year.

Establishing a cooperative, 3,000 sisters take the road to prosperity

Going out to subcontract and transfer land not only solved the problem of repeated yam cropping, but also taught local farmers how to grow yams, stimulated the local agricultural fertilizer and labor markets, and brought prosperity to local farmers.

This group of Gucheng women became increasingly famous locally and became the "leaders" in becoming rich. With the idea that "one person being rich is not true prosperity; only when sisters are rich is it true prosperity," Liu Heying and her sisters formed a cooperative.

The cooperative not only absorbed women who had moved from Gucheng, but also actively recruited farmers from around Xiangyang. By 2015, cooperative members had grown to more than 3,000 households, with a total planting area of 20,000 mu. Among the cooperative's sisters, some were already worth over a million yuan, and more than 80 had bought high-end cars.

"Joining the cooperative is like taking a reassurance pill," said the cooperative's sisters. They no longer feel lost about market prices. The cooperative connects members on one end and the market on the other, so from planting to harvesting they know what to expect.

Skillfully growing yams, both output and prices have risen

On February 29, at the transferred yam base in Wenji Town, Zhongxiang City, cooperative members were digging yams. "Now is not the yam-producing season; what we are digging is off-season yams. By making good use of the time gap, we can sell each kilogram for 1 yuan more," said Liu Heying, leader of the cooperative. Agricultural entrepreneurship cannot succeed by hard work alone; one must work hard and also work smartly.

The first clever point is saving effort. To solve the problem of the high labor intensity and low efficiency of manual soil turning in the past, cooperative members and agricultural machinery personnel jointly developed a yam subsoiler. Subsoiling depth extended from 1 m in the past to 2 m now, and from single-drill subsoiling to double-drill subsoiling.

With machines roaring, turning the soil became easy, and yam output also increased several times over. Per-mu yield rose from 1,000 kg in the past to 4,000 kg, with the highest reaching 10,000 kg. In addition, the cooperative also bought an excavator for more than 200,000 yuan, which to a certain extent reduced labor intensity and improved work efficiency.

The second clever point is quality. "Quality comes first, and to have quality you must first have good seeds. In order to select high-quality yam seeds, we entrepreneurial sisters bought high-quality yam seeds at a high price," Liu Heying said. High input brings high returns, and good seeds solved past problems such as difficulty increasing income despite increased output.

"If yams are to be favored by consumers, quality is the key." In production, to make the products meet green and pollution-free requirements, the cooperative uses only farmyard manure. Even if the price of farmyard manure rises to 60 yuan per cubic meter and each mu of land requires an investment of more than 1,000 yuan, cooperative members are not vague about it.