Colored varieties hide a wealth code, and the prospects for increasing income through cultivation are considerable
Purple potatoes, purple yams, black peanuts, multicolored peanuts... Recently, Qi Jixiang, an old farmer from Mengyin County, Shandong, broadened his horizons at the Chengdu Agricultural Expo and also became interested, wanting to introduce these good things he had never seen before and bring them back to drive his fellow villagers in developing colored agriculture.
So, what exactly is the background of these novel and special colored varieties? What are their market prospects? The reporter went to Chengdu, known as the "Land of Abundance," to explore entrepreneurial stories and unlock the wealth code hidden behind colored agriculture.
Story One
A post-85s graduate student couple carved out a path with purple potatoes
On the morning of November 21, at Chengdu's branded entrepreneurship event "Jingronghui," 27-year-old Liu Yisheng took the stage and, facing dozens of venture capital executives in the audience, spoke about the wealth fission that the purple potato project could bring.
Because of purple potatoes, Liu Yisheng not only reached the finals stage of the Global Social Enterprise Startup Competition (GS-VC) last year, but also gained love, marrying Peng Jie, who was both a classmate and a team member.
Liu Yisheng and Peng Jie both came from Sichuan Agricultural University with formal graduate training, focusing on potato cultivation. In 2012, they used a small experimental plot allocated by the school to try growing the purple potato "Black Beauty." After harvesting, Liu Yisheng and Peng Jie did not take them to the market to sell like other classmates did. Instead, they took samples to find customers and orders. Through various efforts, they ultimately secured a 300-ton order from a Shenzhen company at 7-8 times the price of ordinary potatoes, earning their first bucket of gold from purple potatoes.
After more than two years of development, Liu Yisheng and Peng Jie's purple potato business grew larger and larger. Their commercial potato base expanded to more than 1,000 mu, and they successfully achieved year-round production technically. Last year, the company already earned nearly 500,000 yuan in profit.
Regarding future development, Liu Yisheng said the company will further broaden sales channels, let the market better understand purple potatoes, and build the "Zishi" brand. In addition, it will carry out in-depth cooperation with Sichuan Agricultural University's food, cultivation, storage and transportation and other related specialties to further develop new products such as fruit-type purple potatoes and make products better fit market demand.
Story Two
Multicolored peanuts are in short supply, but the difficulty lies in high technical requirements and hard scale expansion
This year, the multicolored peanut seeds bred by the Black Peanut Cooperative in Sanxi Green Island Town, Jintang County, Chengdu, again became a hot commodity. Before they even promoted them, orders had already come in.
Speaking of how he became involved with multicolored peanuts, cooperative head Tang Minggang told the reporter it started from seeing something "novel." In 2013, Old Tang accidentally heard that someone was growing a colored peanut with multicolored seed coat. Out of curiosity, he went to investigate. Then, driven further by curiosity and with the help of the Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, he introduced 10 kg of colored peanut seeds. Originally he just wanted to give it a try, but unexpectedly, as soon as colored peanuts were launched, the market response was enthusiastic, and even at the high price of 50 yuan per kg, demand exceeded supply.
However, although colored peanuts are good, the cooperative's main business is still black peanuts, with a planting area already exceeding 5,000 mu. Why don't cooperative farmers adjust their structure and grow more colored peanuts, which have several times the benefit? "The planting technology requirements are high, and if management is poor, yields are too low," Old Tang explained the reason.
It turns out that colored peanuts are varieties introduced from Taiwan, China and the United States, belonging to tropical peanuts, and their planting techniques differ greatly from our traditional peanut cultivation. "Farmers still use the old methods, and the yields are very low, so they are unwilling to take risks again," Old Tang told the reporter. At present, the cooperative has gradually figured out a set of colored peanut cultivation techniques, and the yield per mu can reach 300 kg. Next, it will gradually pass the techniques on to farmers in order to gradually expand the colored peanut planting area.
Wealth Code One
Only with scientific management to increase yields will farmers follow along
"Compared with conventional varieties, colored varieties often have unsatisfactory yields." Dr. He Wei, a member of the Sichuan Provincial Variety Approval Committee and head of Sichuan's potato research group under the "13th Five-Year Plan," told the reporter that taking potatoes as an example, purple potatoes existed in ancient times and are not something newly developed by modern people. It is only because purple potatoes have poor disease resistance and low yields that people gradually eliminated them and instead bred higher-yielding yellow-fleshed varieties.
He Wei said that although most colored varieties have been improved through hybridization and have enhanced disease resistance, their yields still cannot compare with conventional varieties, and the cultivation techniques often have higher requirements. "Taking purple potatoes as an example, they are 30% lower than conventional potatoes," He Wei said.
Liu Yisheng's team has formal professional training and is thoroughly familiar with every link of potato virus elimination, pre-basic seed cultivation, basic seed breeding, and commercial potato production. Logically speaking, they have a great advantage in providing guidance on cultivation techniques, but at the beginning they suffered because farmers did not trust them, and their technology alone was hard to apply. Liu Yisheng is still deeply impressed by the fact that when promoting the "straw no-till" cultivation technique (that is, after placing seed potatoes in a paddy field, covering the potato pieces with a layer of straw, then applying organic fertilizer, and covering with soil and plastic film), farmers scoffed at it. "But at harvest time, when they turned over the soil and saw it full of potatoes, the farmers were convinced and all rushed to learn the technique," Liu Yisheng said.
In order to reassure cooperative farmers and encourage them to follow along boldly, Liu Yisheng also agreed with the farmers: if technical guidance is inadequate, then even if the field has a total crop failure, he will still pay the farmers the agreed price. In this way, some farmers who had originally been strongly inclined to wait and see also became willing to join, and the base area expanded from 200 mu to more than 1,000 mu in one year.
Wealth Code Two
Focus on the health and wellness angle, use the internet to break into the market
"Colored varieties often contain large amounts of anthocyanins. Taking colored peanuts as an example, they are a product of nature, the fruit of researchers' labor after optimized screening and hybridization of a large number of peanut materials. They are not genetically modified products. Their taste and nutritional quality are superior to ordinary peanuts, and the content of certain proteins, amino acids, and trace elements is also far higher than ordinary peanuts, which fits modern society's demand for healthy foods very well," said researcher Zhang Xiangqiong, a peanut expert at the Industrial Crops Research Institute of the Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
However, whether it was Old Tang, who mainly deals in colored peanuts, or Little Liu, who mainly deals in purple potatoes, both felt somewhat helpless when opening up the market. It turned out that because many consumers currently do not understand colored varieties and believe online rumors, they even suspect colored varieties: "Are they genetically modified?" "Are they dyed?" Faced with customer doubts, Liu Yisheng even went to a third-party testing institution in Shanghai and commissioned a "non-GMO identification report."
Through repeated publicity and education, more and more consumers began to understand, recognize, and accept purple potatoes. "The role of WeChat Moments is not small here." Liu Yisheng told the reporter that their WeChat store sales were very considerable, and one event could sell more than a thousand portions, many of them repeat customers. This year, Liu Yisheng also recruited an e-commerce operations expert to focus on further expanding the retail market through the internet and building a brand.
Like Little Liu, Old Tang also kept his eyes fixed on the internet. Old Tang told the reporter that last year, most of the cooperative's 5 million yuan in sales came from the internet. "The cooperative spends tens of thousands of yuan each year on promotion through Alibaba and Baidu rankings," Old Tang said.