Aquaculture Helps Zhang Sufang, a Weak Woman from Yugan County, Jiangxi, onto the Road to Prosperity

At present, agriculture is shifting from traditional single-unit farming to modern comprehensive agriculture, and the "three rural" landscape is undergoing a qualitative transformation. In Yugan County, Shangrao, Jiangxi, various social forces and social capital are eagerly entering the "three rural" sector, injecting new elements and energy into the transformation of traditional agriculture. Against this backdrop, Zhang Sufang, an agricultural entrepreneur of the new era in Yugan County, has become one of the members of the new force upholding the new agriculture.

Zhang Sufang was born in a rural area and was originally an ordinary worker in Yugan County. Starting from the most grassroots worker position in Yugan, relying on her intelligence and love of learning, she rose step by step to the top management of the group and became a general manager of a group department, making her a white-collar worker who wanted for nothing. But she was not satisfied. With more than a decade of hard-won experience, she keenly discovered that being a new-style agricultural entrepreneur was more challenging. So she set her sights on a local advantageous industry and went into aquaculture.

In the early days of starting her business, due to a lack of aquaculture technology, all the fish in her entire pond died overnight. To address this, she and her husband made multiple trips to aquaculture bases in Guangdong and Zhejiang to learn from their experience, invited professional aquaculture personnel to provide on-site guidance, and actively participated in aquaculture training. From theory to practice, constantly summing up experience in practice, she fell many times and kept drawing lessons.

The heavy lesson at the beginning of her business led her to adjust her approach. Through nearly 6 years of arduous effort, she overcame difficulties that ordinary people could hardly imagine and established the Yugan County Qinghai Aquaculture Base. At present, the base has 500 mu of waters cultivating aquatic products such as gorgon fruit, loach and fish, and the Qinghai Aquaculture Cooperative has been established. The cooperative currently has 138 members and 28.68 hectares of tidal flat area, radiates to and drives 3 administrative villages, arranges employment for 50 rural laborers, and increases the average annual income of member households by 5,050 yuan.

After years of dedication, the Yugan County Qinghai Aquaculture Cooperative has obtained a pollution-free agricultural product certificate. In 2013 it was awarded "Municipal-Level Demonstration Cooperative," in 2014 it was awarded "Provincial-Level Demonstration Cooperative," and in 2015 it was rated a national "Outstanding Science Popularization Demonstration Base." Zhang Sufang said: "If there is investment, there will definitely be returns. No matter what you do, you must do it well and make something of it. In the future, I will keep innovating in technology and strive to open up an even broader world in the aquaculture endeavor."