CHINA’S agricultural conglomerate Beidahuang Group has just concluded this year’s first season harvest on a modern rice plantation in Xiaogang Village, Anhui Province. More than 30 rice varieties were harvested in the pilot plantation of 33 hectares of field land.

Entrusted by the Xiaogang village committee, the company launched the project, which gives farmers a free and assured choice of what rice strains they grow in subsequent seasons.

Yan Lihua, 74, has leased his farmland to another villager so that his family can focus on running the countryside bed and breakfast business, and so that those more able to farm can carry out larger scale farming.

Seniors like Yan have childhood memories of hunger, and the village was known for its beggars before it won a name as the birthplace of China’s rural reform. “We fought hard to get the land use rights. Now we transfer it to earn rent. We are relieved from farming and can focus on things that we want to do,” said Yan.

The pioneering reform spirit has been taken on by village, which continues to generate new reform initiatives.

Yin Yurong, a pig farmer in the village, recently proposed a new idea — setting up a land stock cooperative. Yin explained that her idea of land stock was not just to reward land leasing with rental fees, but also a certain amount of dividends from the land use if the land leaser joins the cooperative.

In August, her proposal was endorsed by the village committee. So far, over 40 households have signed to join the cooperative.

Besides individual endeavors, all 4,288 villagers in Xiaogang were turned into shareholders of the village’s collective in 2017 to benefit from the business development from Xiaogang’s intangible assets.

Villagers each received a dividend of 350 yuan (about US$55.5) in February from the village collective’s earnings of 8.2 million yuan from the operation in agriculture, education, tourism and capital management in 2017. “Though it’s not a big sum of money, it definitely marks a hopeful beginning,” Yan Yushan said.

As a member of the village committee, Yan said the village’s reform history was its intangible assets, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.

He also said the village’s collective had a think tank of 18 entrepreneurs. With the think tank’s support, the village was able to set up a 400-million-yuan modern agricultural reform fund, and to initiate modern farming and develop farm produce under the Xiaogang trademark.

(Xinhua)