Flue-cured tobacco cultivation sets Xinping villagers in Huilong Town, Xingren on the road to prosperity

    In recent years, Xinping Village in Huilong Town has actively changed its mindset and made full use of local resource advantages to vigorously develop flue-cured tobacco cultivation. This year, 32 households in the village planted 250 mu of flue-cured tobacco, which is successively being loaded onto racks for curing, and is expected to generate an income of more than 640,000 yuan. 

    August brings golden autumn and fragrant melons and fruits. Zhou Jilin, a major tobacco grower in Xinping Village, and his family cannot rest at all in this beautiful season. To seize the rare spell of clear weather during this period, the whole family, old and young, has joined in, with every step, from picking tobacco, stringing tobacco, loading it onto racks to curing, arranged in perfect order. This bustling scene reveals the joy of the Zhou family as a bumper harvest lies in sight. It is said that Zhou Jilin's family of 6 once depended only on more than 10 mu of land to grow grain and make a living. As the flue-cured tobacco industry in Xingren County grew stronger and was gradually promoted, Zhou Jilin began to explore tobacco cultivation. After two years of trials, an income of more than 10,000 yuan a year let his family taste the sweetness of growing tobacco. In recent years, as large numbers of young and middle-aged laborers in the village flowed out to the coastal areas, quite a lot of idle farmland was left behind, which again gave the enterprising Zhou Jilin a breakthrough for getting rich. This year, he spent less than 4,000 yuan in rent to lease more than 10 mu of idle farmland in the village and planted more than 10,000 tobacco seedlings. At present, his flue-cured tobacco is being loaded onto racks one after another. Thanks to the good climate and proper cultivation techniques, his tobacco leaf output will reach 5,700 jin, and he can increase his income by more than 40,000 yuan. 

    Liao Dengyang, secretary of the village Party branch, said: "The one-story houses in our village, one after another, were all built by growing flue-cured tobacco; the village now has 32 households engaged in scaled cultivation, with the largest area reaching 15 mu; the village now has 36 centralized curing barns, and the highest annual income of a tobacco grower exceeds 80,000 yuan, while the lowest is more than 10,000 yuan. Some farming households have gone from escaping poverty to becoming prosperous and striving for a moderately prosperous life in less than 4 years, which has a certain practical significance for the future economic development of our Xinping Village."