A female PhD in agriculture fights hard to carve out a new world of her own
Duan Ran, an innovative female PhD.
Zhonghe Qingya can produce over a thousand kinds of sprouting vegetables.
People who know Duan Ran well all like to call her Dr. Duan. This respectful title is not only because she truly holds a doctoral degree, but even more because of the proud innovations she has made in the agricultural field. From embarking on the path of entrepreneurship in 2012 to now, in just three short years, Duan Ran has done only two things: first, founding an agricultural carnival, and second, producing organic sprouting vegetables. But you must not underestimate these two things, because both of them have overturned agricultural tradition with a completely new approach. This female PhD, with her extensive knowledge and broad vision, is leading a new revolution in the agricultural industry.
Giving up the iron rice bowl to start a business alone
She studied landscape planning and design as an undergraduate at Huazhong Agricultural University, and also studied agricultural economics and management. After graduation, she went directly into the Ministry of Agriculture and became a national civil servant. Born in 1973 and raised in Beijing, Duan Ran was seen by many around her as an outstanding girl from childhood.
After entering the workforce, Duan Ran's career path changed several times, but she never left the word "agriculture." After sitting in a civil servant position for 1 year, Duan Ran went to China National Seed Group, an enterprise under the Ministry of Agriculture, and began working on breeding and seed operations, communicating with seed industry organizations around the world, staying there for 7 years. She then spent more than a year busy with the listing of Beilin Technology Company, responsible for company formation, talent recruitment, and building the business framework. "If I had stayed in a civil servant position the whole time, I would not be so sensitive to the market," Duan Ran said. She is very grateful that the organization cultivated her; her experience in enterprises gave her broader exposure and also laid a solid foundation for her later entrepreneurship.
Although her work was going smoothly, Duan Ran was not content with the status quo. At the end of 2003, she was admitted for government-funded study abroad and went to the Netherlands to pursue a doctorate in the agricultural industry for further study. Two years later, after graduating with her doctorate, she found a job in the Netherlands, bought a house, and decided to settle there. But in 2006, a brand-new opportunity prompted her to return to the embrace of her homeland. "In 2005, the state carried out a pilot land transfer in Chengdu, Sichuan, allowing land originally scattered among farmers to be concentrated in the hands of large agricultural households, enterprises, cooperatives, and other organizations. This is a very core element of agricultural industrialization," Duan Ran said. The introduction of such a policy made her feel she could apply what she had learned, and coupled with invitations from former friends and leaders, she returned to China and entered the Industry Bureau of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, doing some work related to the development of agricultural industrialization. On this platform, Duan Ran gained an in-depth understanding of how to apply for national key projects and how to transform science and technology into productivity.
The agricultural carnival made her famous overnight
"I think I am a lucky person. The first thing I did after founding the company was Beijing's agricultural carnival." In 2012, after the World Strawberry Congress ended, Changping District began developing the post-strawberry economy, but no one could clearly explain what exactly the post-strawberry economy was or what specific things should be done. At that moment, Duan Ran's concept of using existing venue facilities to provide citizens with a good place for leisure and build a good platform for farmers to increase income moved the leaders in charge of Changping District and the city. Duan Ran spent 9 months stationed at the strawberry garden in Xingshou Town, Changping District, and wrote the planning proposal for the first Beijing Agricultural Carnival. "A 45,000-character document and more than 800 pages of PPT condensed the hard work of me and my team members." Recalling the scene at the beginning of her entrepreneurship, Duan Ran still feels stirred.
In 2013, the first Beijing Agricultural Carnival appeared, and projects rich in creativity and technological content such as a thousand-jin giant pumpkin, colorful eggplants, a tomato maze, and robot strawberry picking appeared one after another. In just 51 days, it attracted more than 1 million visitors and drove surrounding strawberry-picking gardens to achieve sales revenue of nearly 200 million yuan. This carnival activity, which perfectly combined agriculture and entertainment for the first time, completely overturned people's traditional understanding of agriculture. Many people exclaimed that agriculture could actually be so fun and so high-end. Duan Ran became famous overnight.
Afterward, the agricultural carnival activity met Beijing citizens on schedule every year and blossomed across the country. Wuhan, Hangzhou, Ningxia... Just before this year's "October 1st" holiday, Duan Ran and her team were busy again for the opening of the first Guiyang Agricultural Carnival. "The success of the carnival makes me feel very happy and very gratified. It allowed me to fully apply what I have learned over more than twenty years." Although Duan Ran always says she is lucky, this luck and success were earned through the accumulation of more than twenty years of practical agricultural experience, because the person who can achieve a carnival needs comprehensive qualities, not a single specialty. Duan Ran has such a foundation and strength.
Although there are now more and more participants in the carnival activity, within the circle, no one would deny Duan Ran's position as the "originator of the agricultural carnival." "I often meet some people at activities, and they will shake hands with me full of respect, and even bow to me," Duan Ran said. To her, the agricultural carnival is like a child carried for ten months. Although she is full of affection for it, she does not want to keep this child in her arms all the time. If more people can hold it and like it, that is what makes her happiest and most joyful. For her, how much money to make or how much profit to seek through the agricultural carnival is not the most important thing. What matters is that this trend she has led can be liked and recognized by more and more people.
Innovating the sprouting vegetable production model
In addition to letting the agricultural carnival activity take root across the country, Duan Ran's another innovation is building the world's largest sprout factory using the methods of a plant factory. Zhonghe Qingya Sprout Production Co., Ltd., located in Zhaoquanying Town, Shunyi District, is the main production base for "Dr. Duan's sprouting vegetables." In this factory building with a construction area of 14,000 sq m are intelligent production equipment invented by Dr. Duan herself and holding multiple national invention patents, producing about 100 tons of sprouting vegetables every day.
"In people's traditional concepts, agriculture means planting one grain of millet in spring and harvesting ten thousand seeds in autumn. Farmers always have the image of facing the yellow earth with their backs to the sky. But I want to change this fixed concept and produce agricultural products according to industrial standards." The concept of a plant factory is no longer new, but Duan Ran is absolutely at the forefront in applying it skillfully to actual production.
From open-field cultivation to protected agriculture, and then to factory production, people use advanced technological means to make agricultural production more disaster-resistant and, to some extent, more controllable. Duan Ran's sprouting vegetable plant factory not only makes agricultural production completely controllable, but also more standardized. "We select high-quality seeds, use filtered purified water, and let them germinate in incubation buckets made of food-grade panels," Duan Ran said. Throughout the entire production process, 26 parameters including light, temperature, humidity, and the method of spraying water can all be controlled in a standardized way. Among them, there are 55 methods of spraying water alone, truly achieving pollution-free, substrate-free, pesticide-free, all-weather production of green organic sprouting vegetables.
"We are an enterprise producing vegetables, but we have obtained QS food-grade certification. This is the first case nationwide." Duan Ran's Zhonghe Qingya Sprout Production Co., Ltd. currently holds 100 patents, 26 of which are for sprouting vegetables, and can produce more than 1,000 varieties of sprouting vegetables. In the eyes of many people, producing sprouting vegetables is the most water-wasting, but in fact, compared with other agricultural methods, Duan Ran's plant factory is instead very water-saving. "Our designed capacity is 150 tons per day, which is equivalent to the annual vegetable output of 10,000 mu of land. Under the same output, our water consumption is one-fifteenth that of open-field cultivation and one-tenth that of protected agriculture," Duan Ran said.