Editor’s note: Today’s news collection revolves around the keyword: agriculture. Although we live in a fast-paced industrialized and digitalized era, the foundation agriculture lays for us is too indispensable to belittle. Under no circumstance should we seek development detached from agriculture.

1. Graduating from an agriculture vocational college, Ji Weiping chose to start up his own business from scratch. However, trials and errors accompanied along the arduous path. When he was 18 years old, he went to Songyang to stock up on chicken. But the chicken turned out to be unproductive which is a tough pill for him to swallow. Raising poultry doesn’t have much profitability. Accidentally, he tried planting grapes as a way to recover his prospects which was inspired by a peasant’s achieved grape story. Surely, he encountered many obstacles. Worse still, he couldn’t even diagnose the infected disease of grape, let alone growing in large areas. Modestly and earnestly, he asked for specialized suggestions from professors at Zhejiang University and squeezed out every minute possible to boost his knowledge. Concerned about his fellow men, he started planting tutorials that are called “grape college” designed to disseminate viticulture techniques that render people rid of mediocrity. 

2. Warm May is the prime time for waxberry. Also, 2022 is a year of importance to Zhou Zengqun, who is born in an average countryside family and studied agricultural expertise at Northwest A&F University. The man from Shaanxi province reckons Xijv county in Zhejiang as his second hometown. He spends nearly three decades in the research of growing waxberry and develop more than thirty breeds that amplify the benefits of the waxberry economy. Hurdles like juicing and retaining freshness are all removed by Zhou’s gritty determination. Purely selling fresh fruits isn’t considered a profitable practice for the limited market of deep processing. Jvxianzhuang, which literally means a place where the immortals gather, is the factory he established to promote a series of waxberry drinks that both fully make use of available resources and deliver welfare to people who intend to be employed. 

3. It’s not a loss of normalcy to see the ever-rising prices of fruits in Hangzhou. However, recently, a large proportion of citizens have witnessed the robust or even aggressive soaring of prices, which is exceedingly unacceptable even for fruit store patrons. A woman who engages in fruit purchasing in Hainan which is a crowning fruit supply island discloses several reasons. First is climate change. Last year, the subtropical island endured a long winter that diminished the whole volume of mango, litchi, and wax apple. Then, due to the ravaging pandemic outside China, the imported fruits set a freight 30% higher than last year. Besides, the convoluted nucleic acid testing procedures prolong the time of trading, thus increasing labor costs. 

4. 2018 is the first year Hu Guangyu got self-employed. He weaved all his dream into the lush forest of Torreya grandis, a tree hailed as the living fossil by people in Zuoxi, Hu’s hometown. Rushing between his domestic affairs, he didn’t set aside to fulfill all the preparations for the new business. Five years later, a green hand in making deals got re-formed to be a veteran chasing his dreams. Over 13,000 Torreya grandis were planted, landing jobs for more than 20 countryside households and hitting an annual average income of nearly 15 thousand yuan. Now, the industry has been the pillar for fattening local peasants’ pockets. 

Editor: Fan Wenwu