Peng'an migrant worker returns home to cultivate wasteland and grow moringa to start a business
Last year, President Xi Jinping visited Cuba and presented moringa seeds as a gift to Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. For a time, moringa was crowned with the title of "national gift" and became famous overnight. Out of curiosity about moringa, yesterday, the reporter came to the moringa planting base of the Yingzi Farmers' Planting Professional Cooperative in Zhongyuanguan Village, Shiliang Township, Peng'an County.
Walking into the moringa planting base, rows upon rows of neat moringa trees swayed in the wind, making it hard to imagine that this land was still a weed-covered barren hill just two years ago. All of this is thanks to a returning migrant worker entrepreneur named Yang Renwei.
Contracting barren hills to plant trees
Yang Renwei is a true farmer. In 1993, he went out to work, having been a construction worker and a car washer. In 2012, he resolutely returned to the countryside and embarked on the path of entrepreneurship.
Yang Renwei's choice was not a blind one. In recent years, in order to make barren hills productive, Peng'an County has introduced a series of assistance measures to encourage farmers to contract barren hills and develop agriculture. After hearing this news, Yang Renwei was very happy. A large amount of land in his hometown, Zhongyuanguan Village, Shiliang Township, was uncultivated, making it excellent entrepreneurial resource. Yang Renwei decided to contract barren hills to plant trees, which on the one hand could improve the ecological environment, and on the other hand could also make him rich.
During the 2012 Spring Festival, Yang Renwei returned to his hometown with his dream. Contracting barren hills, improving the land, buying seedlings, hiring people to plant them... Within a year, Yang Renwei contracted 500 mu of barren hills and planted more than 40,000 trees on the hills, including poplar, walnut, osmanthus and Chinese toon. In 2014, he established the Yingzi Farmers' Planting Professional Cooperative.
During the entrepreneurial process, the county forestry bureau organized agricultural technicians to provide Yang Renwei with free technical guidance and help him formulate a development plan.
Trial planting of the "miraculous tree" moringa
In September 2014, a report titled "The Miraculous Tree Takes Root in Peng'an" caught Yang Renwei's attention. The report said that technicians from the county's Association for Science and Technology for the Elderly had successfully trial-planted moringa. Yang Renwei, who often loved to read agricultural news, had long heard of moringa, known as the "miraculous tree." After reading the report, Yang Renwei was extremely excited. He had originally thought that moringa was only suitable for growing in tropical semi-arid regions, and had not expected that moringa could also be successfully trial-planted in Peng'an. So Yang Renwei went to the county forestry bureau to seek help. After learning of his idea, the leaders of the county forestry bureau were very supportive. They specially purchased moringa seeds for him and arranged for agricultural technicians to provide follow-up services.
As a newly introduced tree species, how should it be planted? Could it succeed? Yang Renwei was at a loss. In this process, Yang Renwei was especially grateful to one person, and that was Wang Wang, an agricultural technician at the county forestry bureau.
Wang Wang introduced that moringa was a tree species just introduced to the county. Although it had been successfully trial-planted before, it had not yet been planted on a large scale. With insufficient planting experience, they could only rely on gradual experimentation. After the moringa seeds were purchased, she placed several thousand moringa seeds on the office desk, selected them one by one, and then carried out separate breeding. Yang Renwei conducted trial planting according to Wang Wang's guidance. Every day he observed the growth of the seeds and informed Wang Wang by phone.
One day in April this year, Yang Renwei went as usual to the moringa seedling nursery to check the growth of the moringa seedlings, and suddenly found that many small insects had appeared on the moringa seedlings. This made Yang Renwei extremely anxious, and he immediately informed Wang Wang of the situation. Faced with such a situation, Wang Wang was also at a loss. Because moringa is an edible "tree of nutrition," pesticides could not be used to kill the insects. In the end, the two adopted the most primitive method, catching the insects by hand, and it took a full two weeks to solve this problem.
Giving equal weight to ecological and economic benefits
The reporter saw at Yang Renwei's moringa planting base that many moringa trees had been cut in half. Yang Renwei said that this batch of moringa planted in early April had already undergone its first harvest at the end of August. According to reports, when moringa grows to nearly two meters tall, the upper part can be cut off for processing and sale. As long as about 70 cm is left of the lower part, it can continue to grow. After about 4 months, another round of harvesting can be carried out.
Speaking of the daily management of moringa, Yang Renwei said that moringa is a treasure from top to bottom, but it is not at all "delicate" and does not require a great deal of effort to care for. Yang Renwei's main work is fertilizing and weeding. At harvest time, it is enough to ask more than 10 villagers to help. At present, the first batch of moringa planted by Yang Renwei has been processed through multiple procedures into products such as moringa tea, moringa infused liquor and moringa noodles.
Yang Renwei told the reporter that growing moringa trees, in the long run, has incalculable economic and ecological benefits. His wish is to reclaim more barren hills and plant the "miraculous tree." Once the environment improves, he can also develop leisure tourism.