Small shiitake mushroom cultivation supports farmers' dream of prosperity
An overseas-returnee student, armed with a passion for entrepreneurship, has struggled in the world of shiitake mushrooms for 6 years. Now, she not only leads surrounding villagers to prosperity but has also forged a new path of cross-regional operation. This issue of Industry Weekly will take you closer to Dong Wei, chairwoman of Zhongjun Mushroom Industry Company, to hear her little-known entrepreneurial story.
Harboring a dream
Embarking on a new journey
In 2008, Dong Wei, having completed her studies in Canada, resolutely returned to China. After extensive investigations, she conceived the idea of cultivating edible fungi to achieve independent entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is difficult; the countless trivial matters involved alone kept Dong Wei extremely busy. To choose a factory site, she traveled while pregnant to more than 10 townships and nearly 100 villages across the district, but finally selected Wangshishan Village, Miaocheng Town, Huairou District as the planting base. Immediately afterward, she threw herself without pause into buying materials and building greenhouses.
Growing mushrooms requires special care, and both humidity and temperature must be well controlled. During her pregnancy, to ensure no mishaps in mushroom cultivation, she stayed in the greenhouse from morning till night, devoting herself to research. When she encountered technical difficulties during cultivation, she consulted materials and looked for books; if there were problems she could not solve herself, she ran to the Agricultural University or even farther places to consult experts. Hard work pays off: in less than a year, her first batch of mushrooms finally came out of the greenhouse. To lead more farmers to grow mushrooms, in 2009 she also established the Beijing Senhai Edible Fungi Planting Professional Cooperative.
After the cooperative was established, Dong Wei led its employees, taking science and technology as the guide, and through communication and research with experts, experimented with and promoted the "New 20 Shiitake". To increase output value and raise farmers' income, she also added two production lines through the cooperative, built a deep-processing production workshop, and overcame technical difficulties such as shiitake drying, quick-freezing and preservation, processing freshly picked shiitake into powder and granular form for citizens' health care and consumption. This made the cooperative a leading enterprise integrating strain research and development, mushroom stick production, fresh mushroom sales and deep processing. In 2012, the shiitake they produced was certified by Nanjing Guohuan as organic fresh mushrooms, and they participated in the Beijing Edible Fungi High-Yield Creation Competition, winning first prize. She also received the title of Beijing "Edible Fungi Planting Expert" awarded by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Agriculture.
Innovating the model
Building a long-term mechanism
Relying on the base
Bringing prosperity to many neighbors
In 2010, national fresh mushroom prices continued to rise, and because the fresh shiitake produced at the base was of excellent quality, proper color and good taste, it was highly favored by the market, selling for 8-10 yuan per kilogram. More valuable still, by building greenhouse facilities to grow shiitake, the output value per mu reached 70,000 yuan and profit reached 30,000 yuan, which in the agriculture sector of the Beijing suburbs, where there are many people and little land, undoubtedly opened a new path for farmers to increase income and become prosperous.
Facing good market demand, Dong Wei guided development according to the situation. She used the knowledge learned abroad, combined it with the actual production of shiitake cultivation, and constantly innovated edible fungi cultivation techniques. Using these techniques, the cooperative developed rapidly. Members grew from the initial dozen or so to 150, and it had more than 400 steel-frame greenhouses. The service radius of the headquarters base expanded from farmers in Wangshishan to farmers in villages such as Lishishan, Beishicao and Yangsong. The net income of farmer households joining the cooperative increased from the original 5,000 yuan per year to more than 20,000 yuan now. The edible fungi planting area also increased from the original more than 500 mu to more than 1,000 mu now.
Cui Shibin of Beifang Village is a farmer only a little over 1.5 meters tall. Small in stature and strength, physical labor is not his strong suit. But this person is quick-witted and fond of study. Since entering the shiitake cultivation base to work in 2009, he studied diligently and practiced hard, and after several years he actually mastered the full set of shiitake cultivation techniques, including stick making, sterilization, inoculation, mycelium growth, color turning, bag removal and watering. In the past two years, while completing the management tasks assigned by the company, he also developed 15 greenhouses himself, generating annual income of more than 300,000 yuan. He became a typical example in the cooperative of someone small in stature but great in ambition. At the Zhongjun Mushroom Industry shiitake cultivation base, there are many similar examples.
Tranquility yields far-reaching goals
Sketching a new blueprint
From its very first day, Zhongjun Mushroom Industry Company boarded the express train of modern urban facility agriculture and entered a development track relying on the capital and radiating to surrounding provinces and cities. In 2011, starting from a 700-mu out-of-town planting base, the company began to enter the Chengde market in Hebei. After several years, shiitake cultivation spread to more than 20 villages in four counties of the Chengde area, including Fengning, Weichang and Xinglong. They adopted the model of company + cooperative + farmers, developing more than 3,000 mu of shiitake cultivation, attracting nearly 1,000 local farmer households to engage in shiitake production, driving more than 1,500 local surplus rural laborers into employment, and promoting the integrated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei economy. According to statistics, this measure can create 120 million yuan in economic benefits for the Chengde area each year. Moreover, by establishing a shiitake cultivation base in Chengde, it also attracted some Hebei-born university students to participate in the base's construction. After several years of training, Li Chenxu, Li Wenguo, Liu Haibin and others have all become leading figures in shiitake cultivation and marketing in the Chengde area, each capable of taking charge independently.
With the expansion of the company's scale and the increase in shiitake production, the company's external influence has also become increasingly prominent. Every peak mushroom season, the base sells as much as 30,000 kilograms of fresh shiitake per day. In addition to supplying Beijing's five major farmers' markets, merchants from Shouguang in Shandong, Zhengzhou in Henan and other places also drive large trucks directly to the company's base to buy goods. For a time, the company's business flourished, merchants gathered, and its marketing radius continued to expand.
This is how Dong Wei, while making the shiitake industry bigger and stronger, also enriched the local people and cultivated a group of skilled shiitake growers. It is precisely because of these outstanding contributions that Dong Wei has successively received many honorary titles, including National Women Leader in Prosperity and Beijing Municipal Science Popularization Leader in Prosperity. The Wangshishan shiitake cultivation base she personally founded has also successively won honors such as National Women's Modern Agricultural Science and Technology Demonstration Base and First Prize in High-Yield Creation from the Beijing Agricultural Technology Extension Station.
Along the way, hardships have accompanied success, and flowers and honors have encouraged one another. Dong Wei frankly says: on the entrepreneurial road ahead, she will strengthen her confidence, overcome difficulties, and keep pressing forward until she reaches a new shore of success.