Edible mushroom cultivation made Tang Yi rich and helped others
Tang Yi is an edible mushroom grower at Alihe Forest Industry Company. With his own hard work and dedication to edible mushroom cultivation, he not only increased his own income and became prosperous, but also led many employees onto the path of growing edible mushrooms to escape poverty and achieve prosperity, becoming a locally well-known entrepreneurial expert in developing a household economy.
In 2005, Tang Yi, who was still a forest management and protection worker at Qiqiling Forest Farm, went to Mudanjiang to attend the wedding of a relative's child. The relative took him to visit the black fungus and nameko mushrooms being cultivated. When he saw that the edible mushrooms, after being dried for a few days, were snapped up by traders, he was tempted. The relative introduced him to a grower's home where he worked as a helper for a month. While helping, he earnestly studied and mastered the technical essentials and operational procedures. When he returned home, he went to the market and bought the raw materials for cultivation, and following the techniques and formulas he had learned, he started making secondary-grade black fungus and nameko mushroom spawn. He and his wife carefully cultivated and meticulously dried them, sold all the black fungus and nameko mushrooms, and made a net profit of more than 6,000 yuan.
The next year he cultivated 10,000 bags of black fungus and 5,000 bags of nameko mushrooms. Because of continuous rain in summer, plus a shortage of hands, they could not pick them all in time, and a lot of the black fungus rotted in the field. Not only did he not make money, he also lost more than 2,000 yuan. His wife became seriously ill because of this.
When the leaders of his unit learned about this, they came to visit him. The forest farm trade union also applied for a 20,000-yuan interest-free loan for him, let him use two former schoolrooms of the forest farm's old school, and gave him two truckloads of logging residue to build greenhouses.
In 2009, he cultivated 30,000 bags of black fungus and 10,000 trays of nameko mushrooms. During the continuous rainy days in summer, the cadres from the forest farm office helped him pick and dry them, ensuring quality and selling price. That year he made a profit of more than 60,000 yuan, not only paying off his debts but also having money left over.
He attached great importance to learning technical knowledge about edible mushroom cultivation, and for many years he has subscribed to various magazines about edible mushroom cultivation. From making spawn to putting black fungus and nameko mushrooms into the ground and onto the beds, he strictly followed technical requirements in every procedure. He was strict about inoculation, strictly disinfected and sterilized the spawn-running site, and controlled the temperature and humidity of the spawn-running room. The quality of the spawn he cultivated fully met technical requirements. In recent years, his cultivation volume of black fungus and nameko mushrooms has reached more than 100,000 bags (trays), and his net income has exceeded 130,000 yuan.
Having become prosperous himself, he did not forget the support of the forest farm. With his rich edible mushroom cultivation techniques, he actively joined the forest farm's household economy association for edible mushroom cultivation development and served as vice chairman. He used his own edible mushroom cultivation site as a demonstration area for the "Project to Help Struggling Employees Get Rich," answering various questions for visitors and passing on without reservation his experience and techniques for cultivating black fungus and nameko mushrooms. Through searching online, consulting books, and with the help of experts and professors from the Mudanjiang Edible Mushroom Research Institute, he mastered the techniques for cultivating primary-grade, secondary-grade, and tertiary-grade spawn of black fungus and nameko mushrooms, and the spawn yield also improved greatly, saving more than 11,000 yuan in spawn costs each year. He also freely passed these techniques on to other employees' family members.
He went deep into the homes of impoverished employees to understand their difficulties in cultivation and give them guidance. Mou Xingchen was a retired employee in difficulty who became paraplegic due to an accident, and his family life was hard. Tang Yi actively formed a technical assistance pair with him, providing follow-up help and guidance throughout the entire cultivation process. Mou Xingchen's wife and child, following Tang Yi's guidance, cultivated 20,000 bags of black fungus and earned 12,000 yuan. Once, a black fungus crop at an employee's home suffered a large-area infection due to improper management, and the employee came to Tang Yi. He immediately rode his motorcycle to the site and taught the grower remedial measures, bringing the black fungus back from danger and avoiding more than 30,000 yuan in economic losses.
Over the past few years, Tang Yi has had experienced growers and new growers form mutual-aid groups, using a method in which everyone helps each other with labor, solving the problem of insufficient manpower for each household and improving production efficiency and cultivation quality. He included impoverished employees interested in edible mushroom cultivation in the mutual-aid groups, laying a solid foundation for them to cultivate edible mushrooms independently and expand their scale. In this way, he helped 25 employees' family members find employment, brought edible mushroom cultivation to 27 households, and increased income for impoverished employees.