An agricultural gold card awaits your nomination: enjoy the scenery while buying local specialties
"In spring, admire a hundred li of peach blossoms; in summer, savor the fragrance of a thousand hectares of peaches... The honey peach is the fruit of Fenghua City, and the annual Honey Peach Festival has become a gold card for Fenghua to present its image to the outside world." On Monday this week, at the "Beautiful Countryside, Charming Agriculture" 2013 Zhejiang Leisure Agriculture Promotion Conference jointly held by the Provincial Department of Agriculture and the Provincial Tourism Bureau, 25 leisure agriculture farming festivals, 12 premium tourism routes and 100 leisure sightseeing agriculture demonstration zones made a splendid appearance, showcasing the beautiful scenery and folk customs of the land of Zhejiang.
At the same time, each county and city, especially the 8 counties and cities that have already won the honor of National Leisure Agriculture and Rural Tourism Demonstration County, has played out distinctly characteristic gold cards centering on local specialty agricultural products. This also signals that another theme of the promotion conference, the Zhejiang Daily "Agricultural Gold Card" nomination activity, has been launched at the same time.
See the scenery and buy local specialties
The "Agricultural Gold Card" awaits your nomination
"As of the end of last year, the province had 2,106 various leisure agriculture areas (sites), with total output value reaching 13.19 billion yuan, an increase of 69% over the 7.8 billion yuan of 2009, with growth rates exceeding 20% for 3 consecutive years. Last year, leisure agriculture sites across the province received more than 59 million visitor trips in total, with total tourism and sightseeing revenue of 9.75 billion yuan." This string of data given by the Provincial Department of Agriculture shows that leisure agriculture and rural tourism have become important pillars of our province's economic development, and among them local agricultural products, especially specialty tourism agricultural products of excellent quality, play a huge role. In recent years, picking tours and experience tours centered on specialty agricultural products have increased rapidly. How to use agricultural products to build a true brand gold card is not only a question for farmers, but also an important topic concerning the sustainable development of leisure sightseeing agriculture across the province and even the promotion of rural industrial structural adjustment.
Countryside upgraded into scenic areas; premium agricultural products drive industrial income growth
During the just-past May Day short holiday, visitors flocked to Tiantou Scenic Area in Fenghua, Ningbo, to pick strawberries. Although at the beginning of the month strawberries had already entered this year's final picking period, compared with the expensive price of 25 yuan/jin when they first came on the market, now 20 yuan can take away a small basket of strawberries you pick yourself, which still holds tremendous appeal for tourists.
As a world-famous ecological village, Tiantou, with an area of 2 sq km, received 1.3 million visitor trips last year, with agricultural income reaching 76.43 million yuan, an increase of nearly 35% compared with 56.8 million yuan in 2010. According to the relevant person in charge of Tiantou Ecological Scenic Area, most of their agricultural income currently comes from leisure sightseeing: "The annual strawberry output is around 50,000-60,000 jin, and picking can continue from early December of the previous year to May of the following year. During the May Day short holiday, besides picking strawberries, visitors can also experience folk activities such as pounding rice cakes. Next, Tiantou will enter the season when roses bloom in full, and when grapes and yellow pear mature in July and August, visitors will again come in droves. Together with tea leaves and north melon, these agricultural products have already built a complete Tiantou brand." It is reported that the picking tour at Tiantou is currently in a new round of planning, which will fill the gap of several months in the picking tour by supplementing the types of fruits and vegetables planted, truly realizing that visitors can pick fresh, ecological fruits and vegetables in all four seasons of the year.
Changxing County in Huzhou, one of the 8 National Leisure Agriculture and Rural Tourism Demonstration Counties, has built 13 farming festival activities around agricultural products, including the Plum Blossom Festival, Cherry Festival, Grape Festival and River Crab Festival, forming "one festival per month", and the Changxing Grape Festival has also created for Changxing the brand image of the "Jiangnan Turpan". Relying on these festival activities, the county carried out income-generating projects such as rural tourism and farmhouse entertainment, receiving 6.53 million visitor trips in the past year, with total revenue reaching 5.75 billion yuan.
Turning parks into scenic areas and agricultural products into tourism gifts, after the development of leisure agricultural tourism in the province, the income-increasing benefits brought by local premium agricultural products are very obvious, and Tiantou and Changxing are exactly models among them.
Gold card value rises; boosting industrial transformation and upgrading
In sharing its experience as a "demonstration county", Changxing County emphasized "valuing quality", including quality improvement and excellent transformation of agricultural products. How can one make one's products stand out from numerous agricultural products and build a leisure sightseeing agriculture site integrating rural charm and free picking, organically combining agriculture with cultural tourism? This question is not only being considered and explored by Changxing, but is also an important topic for many counties, cities and villages in the province.
This search for the "Agricultural Gold Card" activity is carried out in conjunction with the province's series of leisure agriculture activities and will continue from now until September this year. During the 5-month golden season for leisure tourism, it focuses on discovering, excavating, cultivating and refining a batch of tourism agricultural products of excellent quality, green, ecological and with regional characteristics. By realizing innovation in the connotation and extension of agricultural products and increasing product added value, it further enhances the brand image and market value of Zhejiang agricultural products; at the same time it promotes the integration of agriculture and tourism, using products to boost tourism and tourism to drive consumption, realizing both "selling scenery" and "selling local specialties", driving the sustainable development of leisure sightseeing agriculture and boosting agricultural transformation and upgrading.
If there are agricultural products around you that are both acclaimed and popular, and you are willing to share them with us, you can recommend them to us through the Litianxia website, WeChat, Weibo and various other means.