Sun Lingyu Strives to Be a Pioneer on the Road Out of Poverty to Prosperity
It is now the Major Snow solar term, and temperatures have plunged, yet the vast fertile fields of the countryside are bustling everywhere: dredging ditches, leveling land, building roads and bridges -- a scene full of feverish activity, as cadres and the masses alike are actively brewing and planning the grand cause of targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty eradication.
Huitai Village, located southwest of Gaoshibei Town, is a key poverty-alleviation village for the city and town, and also a provincially registered poverty-alleviation village. On October 18 this year, three members of the poverty-alleviation work team from the Provincial Government Procurement Center were stationed in the village; Yu Qigang, a researcher and military-transferred cadre, took up the post of "First Secretary" of the village. In their first week, the resident work team investigated and visited all 26 impoverished households and 80 people in the village, and successively held meetings of the village two committees, the Party members' branch general meeting, and the villagers' representative assembly to vote on, review and re-verify the impoverished households, formulated a development plan for the poverty-alleviation campaign in Huitai Village, and adopted a wall-chart battle plan. The team members lodged at the village office of the neighboring village, and rode bicycles to and from work on time every day.
Hu Youmei, the village Party branch secretary and village committee director, often tells the cadres: "This really is a development opportunity for our village that comes once in a thousand years. Last time, Yu Qigang used his own comrade-in-arms connections to arrange a study visit to the soft-shelled turtle-shrimp-rice farming base in Yicheng; the travel, food and lodging costs were all coordinated and covered by the work team."
Sun Lingyu, deputy director of the village committee, made a special point of taking the reporter to visit his own shrimp-rice co-culture base. "Our place is a well-known 'water bag', with low-lying, uneven terrain; villagers grow rice and wheat relying on the heavens for a harvest, and on top of that the protective purchase price for cotton has been abolished, so there is an urgent need to guide farmers to change their traditional planting and breeding concepts and models," Sun Lingyu said.
After the resident work team arrived, through investigation and visits to understand the situation, they first guided and helped village cadres willing to engage in planting and breeding to try first. From November 11 to 12, the work team organized members of the "two committees" of Huitai and Lailin villages, along with willing breeders, to go to Yicheng City to study soft-shelled turtle-shrimp-rice ecological farming techniques, and to explore an industrial poverty-alleviation model suited to the actual conditions of the stationed villages.
The base follows the "soft-shelled turtle-shrimp-rice symbiosis" model, digging ring-shaped and cross-shaped breeding trenches, releasing soft-shelled turtle and crayfish seedlings, and planting rice; the soft-shelled turtles prey on insects, organisms, organic matter and some crayfish in the fields, and during the peak growth season (May to September each year) are fed bait such as small fish and shrimp. Crayfish have strong reproductive capacity and can ensure a certain harvest every year, while the rice is grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, making it a pollution-free agricultural product; in this way, symbiosis is achieved in soft-shelled turtle-shrimp-rice farming.
Sun Lingyu said that he has currently invested 380,000 yuan in renovating the infrastructure of the shrimp-rice fields, digging ring-shaped trenches, building anti-escape nets, field roads and a work shed, and releasing shrimp seedlings; in October, he transferred 220 mu of land from Groups 3 and 4 of the village at a price of 800 yuan per mu.
"To implement the soft-shelled turtle-shrimp-rice model, you need to buy four-year-old soft-shelled turtle seedlings for feeding, which requires considerable cost, so for now we can only carry out the shrimp-rice co-culture model first," Sun Lingyu said. Next year he plans to expand the breeding area to 500 mu, and by creating a scale demonstration effect, guide impoverished households to join the cooperative, drive villagers to prosper together, and strive to achieve a moderately prosperous society in all respects as soon as possible.