College graduate returns home to start a business and leads fellow villagers onto the road to prosperity
"Big cities have big cities' development opportunities, small towns have small towns' advantages, and rural areas have even more unexpected room for development." On October 8, Zhang Tieying, general manager of Gansu Yuntong Agricultural and Sideline Products Trading Co., Ltd., was loading mushroom substrate while telling a reporter about his entrepreneurial experience.
Zhang Tieying, a girl from Tangshan, was originally a senior white-collar worker in the capital, Beijing, living an enviable petty-bourgeois life. Seeing that the friends around her were all doing what they loved, she thought, "I can't live such a plain life my whole life!" After making up her mind, Zhang Tieying resigned and went into business. While striving away, Zhang Tieying met Wang Yun, who had the same dream. After getting married, Zhang Tieying followed Wang Yun to his hometown, Wanjiaodun Village, Chang'an Town, Ganzhou District.
After a period of getting to know the place, Zhang Tieying found that apart from the land, the family had no other resources that could be used. In 2007, Zhang Tieying and her husband built a greenhouse pigpen at home and began raising pigs. By chance, they saw an introduction to button mushrooms on television. Button mushrooms can be used in cold dishes and hot dishes, and can also be dried and sold. Most importantly, the family's cow dung, wheat straw, and crop stalks could all be used to make mushroom substrate. Seeing this, Zhang Tieying and her husband felt that growing button mushrooms was a good path to wealth. They acted as soon as they decided. At the end of 2007, Zhang Tieying and her husband raised funds and built 14 solar greenhouses to grow button mushrooms.
After two years of cultivation, button mushroom growing brought considerable economic benefits. But shortcomings soon emerged as well. Because the greenhouses were too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and the temperature was hard to control, the button mushrooms could not grow well and the economic benefits were not very high. In 2009, after investigating many options, Zhang Tieying and her husband tore down the greenhouses, transferred land, and built 12 high-standard factory-style button mushroom production workshops. The standardized production workshops quickly brought economic benefits. With three harvests a year, Zhang Tieying and her husband earned 210,000 yuan from just one mushroom shed, bringing a net income of 1.68 million yuan a year. Soon, Zhang Tieying's successful trial planting caught the attention of surrounding farmers, and everyone said they would follow Zhang Tieying and her husband in growing button mushrooms to get rich. Faced with the villagers' requests for advice, Zhang Tieying and her husband patiently provided guidance and help, setting off a wave of entrepreneurship in the local area.