Getting to Know Feng Xiaoyan, a Major Flower and Nursery Stock Grower

    She is a person who refuses to admit defeat and dares to challenge difficulties; she is a person who, while enriching herself, does not forget to help others get rich too. She is the widely known major flower and nursery stock grower Feng Xiaoyan. Feng Xiaoyan lives in Linkuang Town, Zhongxiang City, Hubei Province. Since childhood she had a dream: to have a garden of her own, to mound soil around the plants, water them and fertilize them every day, and watch the flowers and plants grow and bloom day by day.

Feng Xiaoyan

    To realize this dream, in August 1992, Feng Xiaoyan, then the village women's director, resigned from her post and paid her own way to study in the Forestry Department of Huazhong Agricultural University. After nearly two years of effort, she obtained a certificate of completion from the Department of Agriculture and Forestry. From then on she began her entrepreneurial path in flower cultivation. Starting out as a hired worker at a horticultural farm, she applied what she had learned to the practice of flower and nursery stock production. She humbly sought advice from veteran flower growers and experts, laying a solid foundation for her future business. Although her wages were meager and the physical labor heavy at the time, she did not retreat, because this was precisely the career she loved. Later she became her own boss. After nearly 10-plus years of struggle, Feng Xiaoyan's flower and nursery stock market grew larger and larger, with total assets reaching more than 4 million yuan. Ruanping Horticultural Farm grew from a single base of 30 mu into a large nursery stock production enterprise with 5 bases and more than 500 mu in total; the variety of flowers and nursery stock also grew from more than 10 to more than 50, and it now cultivates more than 500,000 seedlings of various kinds. Because the varieties are excellent, the only worry about the seedlings is how fast they grow, not how to sell them. Over the years, Feng Xiaoyan has provided nearby flower growers with more than 400,000 high-quality economic seedlings and the market with more than 400,000 greening seedlings. Her products are sold as far away as Shaanxi, Henan, Hunan, and Wuhan, Xiangfan, Jingmen, Yichang and other places in Hubei Province, making her a veritable "Flower King" in Central China.

    In July 1996, a rare flood disaster struck the Jianghan Plain. Not only were thousands of mu of farmland in Linkuang Town left with no harvest, Feng Xiaoyan's horticultural farm also suffered a devastating blow! The seedlings in the horticultural farm were submerged more than one meter deep in standing water for as long as half a month. More than 100,000 high-quality sand pear seedlings and tens of thousands of greening seedlings that Feng Xiaoyan had carefully cultivated were drowned by the merciless flood! The loss reached more than 100,000 yuan. Watching the results of several years of hard work disappear in an instant, she could not help but cry bitterly! At that time her husband, as a state cadre, was stationed in a village working with farming households on flood fighting and disaster relief, and had no time at all to look after her and the horticultural farm. She had to throw herself into post-disaster recovery all alone. She hired laborers and rinsed the seedlings that still had a glimmer of life one by one with clean water, again and again washing the seedlings full of boundless hope with her tears and sweat! Although the flood was merciless, she had the will to fight the disaster. Feng Xiaoyan finally overcame the difficulties and, in only one year, restored the horticultural farm to vitality. In 1997 she invested more than 200,000 yuan to buy out the 30-year operating rights to 100 mu of barren hills.

    On her entrepreneurial path, she had a good assistant, her husband Huang Jianhua. To support Feng Xiaoyan's career, Huang Jianhua took unpaid leave from his job three separate times to serve as his wife's driver and "bodyguard." In the spring of 1995, Feng Xiaoyan, relying on her own strength, took on the heavy responsibility of director of Ruanping Horticultural Farm. At that time the horticultural farm was overgrown with weeds everywhere, cold and desolate. To revive the horticultural farm, she made a special trip to Wuhan to invite flower and nursery stock experts to the farm for on-site inspection, to assess whether the soil, climate, water sources and other conditions there were suitable for developing garden planting. After receiving the experts' affirmative conclusion, she gained confidence. However, at this time she had just become pregnant and it was inconvenient for her physically. With pruning and grafting, plus poor flower and nursery stock sales at the time, she hesitated and wavered. As her husband, Huang Jianhua saw that his wife, due to the high labor intensity, often had leg pain and cramps and strong morning sickness, and his heart ached, but he knew well that his wife would not easily give up the career she loved. He took the initiative to shoulder all the housework at home, massaged her swollen legs in the evening, and encouraged her: "In doing a career you must persevere; persistence is victory." Hearing this, Feng Xiaoyan peacefully fell asleep leaning on her husband's shoulder. The next morning she plunged back into the nursery to prune and graft, and in the evening she organized her records.

    As a sunrise industry, flower and nursery stock production has broad market prospects, but to remain forever at the forefront of market competition, one must rely on science and technology to remain invincible. Over the years, Feng Xiaoyan not only invited experts and technicians from other places to guide flower and nursery stock production, she also subscribed every year, at a cost of hundreds of yuan, to newspapers and magazines such as China Flower News and Flowers and Nursery Stock Bonsai. Using scientific and technological knowledge, she carried out technological innovation in flower and nursery stock production, actively introduced new varieties, and used new technologies, making the horticultural farm a test field and demonstration site for flower and nursery stock production. Through repeated practice, Feng Xiaoyan successfully introduced new flower and nursery stock varieties such as red magnolia, four-season osmanthus, pointed-leaf magnolia, Leshan Michelia and large-leaf camphor. She also succeeded in grafting osmanthus onto large-leaf privet, and adopted techniques such as greenhouse seedling raising, bud seedling transplanting, chemical regulation and summer side grafting, shortening sand pear seedling production from two years to one, and winning high praise from Wang Chengye, a senior agronomist of the Chinese Society for Horticultural Science. Because Feng Xiaoyan attaches importance to technological progress and relies on science and technology to develop production, 95% of the flowers and nursery stock planted at her horticultural farm are bred and produced by herself, and science and technology are her main means of developing production.