As the water peach harvest season gets underway, I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Lian Tang base in Ding Shan town, located in Pengze County, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province. The peach trees were heavy with ripe fruit, and farmers were bustling about, picking and sorting, all the while celebrating the fruits of their labor.
I sat down with Yu Bin, a key local grower, who spoke enthusiastically about their operations. “We have about three to four thousand peach trees, and we use organic fertilizer to enhance the flavor. This commitment to quality has brought us many repeat customers, and our sales—both online and in-person—are robust.”
Zhang Xiaofei, the village party secretary in Lian Tang, provided insight into the village’s agricultural efforts. “Our demonstration park stretches across 150 acres and yields around 30,000 pounds of peaches. This not only generates roughly 300,000 yuan for the village but also supports 34 impoverished households and creates jobs for 120 locals.”
The village collective’s leadership has encouraged more peach farmers to join the initiative. However, the busy harvest season brings challenges, particularly in storage and transportation. To tackle this issue, local authorities have invested over 1.8 million yuan into building a large cold storage facility named “Fruit Square,” which has greatly improved the storage capabilities for these agricultural products.
In recent years, Ding Shan town has taken proactive steps to secure funding and initiatives, becoming the first in the county to establish a robust rural enterprise—Pengze County Hui Nong Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. This venture has attracted partnerships with companies like Maidou Technology and Pengze Chenshuo, creating a collaborative business model that involves party branches, bases, cooperatives, enterprises, and farmers. This strategy has not only bolstered the production of water peaches but has also expanded into blueberries and pears. By fostering a unified operation based on shared benefits, this effort has created over 300 jobs and generated more than 1 million yuan in revenue.
Looking to the future, Wang Meng, a member of the Ding Shan town party committee and head of local armed forces, shared their strategic goals: “We plan to continue exploring the potential of the ‘One Village, One Product’ strategy, enhance the standardized operations of our village-rich enterprises, and assess our collective assets comprehensively. By establishing a database for town-level collective economic projects and utilizing our resource advantages, we aim to enhance the introduction of agricultural projects and drive the rapid growth of the village collective economy, playing a key role in the revitalization of rural areas.”
