Fruit of Happiness: Wish-Granting Pomelo @Rural Areas Can Be This Fun
Last time, after the LOVE Rice Harvesting Proposal Diary was posted on NewsMarket, it was picked up by Apple Daily and caused quite a stir. I received a lot of letters, including one from a building materials supplier who wanted to sponsor me in renovating my farmhouse, farmers who hoped I could help them do something, and people who wanted to buy rice from me. Of course, my personal starting point is hoping for more creativity to add value to rural areas and agricultural products. I also just saw an article about a nice activity of brushing moss off pomelos, so while thinking about the marketing model of agricultural pre-orders, I'd like to share some of my personally goofy ”works”:
Wish-Granting Pomelo
Here's how it happened. Near my old home in Sanxing there are many orchards: wax apples, pomelos, Asian pears. Among them, my cousin also has a pomelo orchard. Since the yield is only about 1,000 jin or so, he just sells them sporadically to nearby neighbors, relatives and friends for the Mid-Autumn Festival. The amazing thing is, these seedlings were bought from a nearby fruit farmer 20 years ago, but among the same batch of varieties, only the pomelos from my cousin's orchard taste good. So the nearby orchards were abandoned long ago, while his was kept and continues to bear fruit.
At the beginning of this year I asked him how much he sold them for per jin. He said: 35 yuan/jin. I checked and found that the price of old-tree Madou pomelos (Citrus maxima 'Madou') ranges from about 120-600 yuan/jin. I told him that this year I'd help him sell them at 120 yuan per jin. And so began my ”Happiness Fruit Wish-Granting Pomelo” plan. I took the first photo by casually grabbing a sticky note and a rubber band, hanging it on the pomelo, and snapping a picture with my phone. Later I switched to using rice straw woven into a straw rope to replace the rubber band, because I felt the straw rope had a certain texture. After several attempts I wove a tie I was satisfied with, and that's how I developed this not-so-great wish card (if anyone can design and is interested in adding value to rural areas, contact me).
