Hu Wenzhong: "Stealing" the family passbook made him the Mushroom King

    "If I hadn't made up my mind back then and 'stolen' the family passbook, withdrawn the more than 100,000 yuan my wife had saved, and built a mushroom farm, I wouldn't have become this 'Mushroom King'!" Hu Wenzhong, a large-scale mushroom grower in Shuangfupu Town, Ningxiang County, said with a touch of humor as he talked about his experience of building a business.  

One day in mid-March, this reporter followed the winding mountain road to an abandoned military air-raid shelter more than 40 km from Ningxiang County seat, and beside the mushroom farm Hu Wenzhong had painstakingly built, listened to this farmer friend who had worked away from home for many years tell the story of his return home to start a business.  

Since 1999, Hu Wenzhong had been working in Shenzhen, Changsha and other places, doing more than a dozen jobs one after another. Last year, he was laid off when the company he worked for cut staff, and returned to his hometown of Datunying Township, Ningxiang County.  

After nearly 10 years of making his way outside, he was determined to accomplish something in his hometown. He had learned to grow mushrooms before. After some market research, he resolved to set up a mushroom farm, choosing as its site an abandoned military air-raid shelter in Shuangfupu Town more than 60 km from home, and planned an initial investment of more than 100,000 yuan to build the farm.  

When his family first heard that he was going to such a faraway place to grow mushrooms, they could not understand it: "Where can't you grow mushrooms? Why go all the way to a mountain gully so far away?"  

Hu Wenzhong explained: "An air-raid shelter is warm in winter and cool in summer, so mushrooms can be grown there all year round. Growing mushrooms there not only gives high yields, but also good quality."  

Later, when they heard that he was going to invest so much money, his wife, who was working away from home, refused outright: "Growing mushrooms is fine, but don't make the operation too big. Just invest 10,000 or 20,000 yuan, so you don't lose all the hard-earned money from working away."  

Seeing that it was hard to persuade his wife, in April last year Hu Wenzhong, without telling her, took the more than 100,000 yuan the couple had saved from years of working away out of the bank and invested it all in building the mushroom farm.  

During construction, in order to make the limited funds play their proper role, Hu Wenzhong stretched every cent as far as it could go. By day he built roads and strung wires; by night he prepared materials and cultured spawn. For a full month, he actually laid a concrete road, put up electrical wires and built a mushroom-growing greenhouse of nearly 100 sq m inside that air-raid shelter, which had been abandoned for many years.  

At dawn on May 18, when the first batch of fresh mushrooms Hu Wenzhong picked was snapped up by vegetable farmers in Shuangfupu Town, he shed tears of joy and excitement. Because the mushrooms were fresh and of good quality, Hu Wenzhong's mushrooms became more and more famous. Mushroom wholesalers from Ningxiang, Changsha and other places came to him, asking for long-term supply. Hu Wenzhong struck while the iron was hot and invested another more than 100,000 yuan, expanding the mushroom-growing greenhouse to more than 1,000 sq m and hiring more than 10 local returning migrant workers and farmers to step up production. Daily output soared from more than 50 kg to more than 500 kg. From July last year to February this year, he produced more than 50 tons of fresh mushrooms, with an output value of more than 200,000 yuan. He quickly became a widely known "Mushroom King."  

In February this year, while out exploring the market, Hu Wenzhong got to know a mushroom wholesaler at the Changsha Mawangdui Vegetable Wholesale Market, and the two hit it off immediately: the wholesaler would exclusively sell all of Hu Wenzhong's fresh mushrooms. There was only one condition: Hu Wenzhong had to process and package the fresh mushrooms he produced.  

Without a second word, Hu Wenzhong went home and took out the nearly 100,000 yuan he had earned in almost a year, and began ordering packaging line equipment, building a cold storage, and expanding production. Someone joked, "This money wasn't 'stolen' from home again, was it?" After hearing Hu Wenzhong's story, someone else even asked him a question: "At the time, you 'stole' the only more than 100,000 yuan in the family and put it all into building a mushroom farm. What if you had failed? How did you have such courage back then?" Hu Wenzhong thought for a moment and answered very simply: "I was full of confidence about running the mushroom farm well, and confidence supported determination. That's why I dared to do it at the time."