High-tech apple cultivation note: Before leaving the factory, each apple should take 32 photos
"If the cloud is an apple tree in the sky, I hope it will be planted in the East Asian branch of heaven soon." Under the Douban Disney animation "Johnny Apple Seed" entry, a short review wrote so.
In 1802, Johnny stood under an apple tree, looking at the caravan heading west. They are trailblazers, full of ideals and hopes. Johnny wants to go with them, but he worries that he will become a useless person who can only plant apple trees. His patron saint encouraged him, "If you want to do it, do it." So Johnny, with the "apple dream", with apple seeds and apple cultivation techniques, became a pioneer as he wished, so that the cloud-like apple blossoms bloomed in the Western United States.
Spanning two hundred years, something similar happened to a Chinese. This Shandong boy named Song Nan, with his "Oriental Apple Dream", ended his study abroad career and returned to his hometown to plant apple trees.
Oriental Apple Dream: International students returned to their hometowns and built a modern apple base of thousands of acres
From Yantai all the way to the east, smell the apple, to the easternmost land and sea junction, to Weihai Rongcheng. Rongcheng County, named after "Shi Huang tasted a big fish shot at Rongcheng Mountain", belonged to Yantai Special District in 1958, and was withdrawn from the county in December 1988 to set up a city, and was later managed by Weihai City.
▲ Rongcheng apple is fully bathed in sunlight when it grows, the apple is evenly colored, the fruit body is red, not only the fruit shape is beautiful, but also the flavor is unique. Li Yunfeng | photo
Rongcheng is located in the Bohai Rim planting area, one of the four dominant apple producing areas in China, and has a history of more than 100 years of apple cultivation. A hundred years ago, in addition to the Chinese-derived apple Nai and Lin Zhen, Rongcheng began to introduce Western apples. After breeding and improving, Rongcheng apple has 64 cultivars, including a small number of traditional varieties of XiaoGuoguang, Jin Shuai and Red Star, as well as red Fuji and Gala introduced after the 1980s. It is reported that the annual output of Rongcheng apples can reach more than 200,000 tons, and the output value is nearly 1 billion yuan. Apple has become the dominant industry for local farmers to increase their income.
Climbing trees and picking apples is a common childhood memory of many locals. "In fact, the apples that have just been picked are not the most delicious, and they are picked and stored in the cold storage for a period of time, and the taste is more beautiful." Song Nan, a merchant in the pinduoduo Yueduo fruit fresh flagship store, tasted the apples he had just picked while ridiculing himself as a "human flesh sugar detector".
Born in 1988, Song Nan graduated from university and studied abroad. During his study abroad, he began to start his own business and achieved good results in the catering and flower industries. What is surprising is that this "other people's child" resolutely returned to China when his career was booming, and he stepped into the mud and planted apples.
▲ Song Nan's orchard implements a wide row of dense planting, with a row spacing of 4 meters, and large agricultural machinery enters and exits freely. Li Hao | photo
It all started with a chance visit in 2012 on a modern apple farm in Washington State. Growing up in Rongcheng, Song Nan is no stranger to apple orchards, but it is the first time that apples and fully automatic sorting and packaging factories are scattered throughout the mountains like vineyards. In the orchard of my hometown, trees are next to each other, branches and branches are stacked together. People pass through the forest, they need to bend down to walk through, from planting to picking, all need to be done manually.
But the orchard in front of you, the gap between trees and trees, can accommodate agricultural vehicles to work back and forth, drip irrigation pipes are laid under the trees for automatic irrigation, and the harvested fruits are sorted by machines in the packaging workshop. All this deeply shocked Song Nan. An idea to transform the apple industry in my hometown, like a small sapling, broke through the ground from the bottom of my heart.
"I am a person who can do what I want", Song Nan immediately began industry research, preparing for returning to his hometown to grow apples. Although his family has always been in business, he has never been involved in apple farming. Song Nan told his father the idea and immediately got his father's support. Father Song said, "Growing apples is an agricultural sentiment that requires the support of technology and talents. ”
In 2013, Song Nan carried the "Oriental Apple Dream", brought foreign advanced concepts back to China, and built a 2300-acre modern apple planting base in his hometown under the policy guidance and support of the Rongcheng Municipal Government and the Municipal Bureau of Agriculture.
Test the water standardization: Before packing the box to leave the factory, each apple has to take 32 photos
China is a big apple producer, with more than 50% of the world's planting area and total output. However, in the direction of becoming an apple growing power, the domestic apple industry still has a long way to go, whether from the production end or the sales end.
▲ Song Nan requires employees to strictly control the quality of fruits, from planting to packaging, every link can be traced back. Li Hao | photo
"China's apple industry needs to adhere to the concept of green and high-quality development, pay more attention to science and technology and innovation in concepts, and comprehensively improve the efficiency of factor utilization and the quality of industrial development." Huo Xuexi, professor at Northwest A&F University and chief scientist of the national apple industry technology system, said that the development of the apple industry needs to lead industrial upgrading with science and technology.
Song Nan, who returned with advanced ideas to grow apples, first solved the problem of backward planting technology and unstable quality.
At the beginning of the establishment of the park, Song Nan turned the original soil into a large-scale deep plough and realized the terraced slope. At the same time, the introduction of advanced wide row dense planting mode, Israel's drip irrigation and water and fertilizer integration technology, a large number of organic fertilizers, improve the content of soil organic matter, regular soil testing, to ensure the balance of soil trace elements, for the growth of fruit trees to create a good ecological environment.
But Song Nan's "Oriental Apple Dream" was not as smooth as imagined. Because of the careless selection of seedlings, when an orchard of several hundred acres of scale had begun to bear fruit, it was found that the fruit tree had a large-scale disease. This means that all the efforts made in the first four years have been wasted, and the direct loss is nearly ten million. No matter how much you don't want to, you can only cut them all. Fortunately, he held on.
▲The high-frequency camera takes 32 photos of each apple, and each photo includes data such as size, color, and quality. Li Hao | photo
Song Nan said, "Good apples are planted and selected. "Under the fine sorting criteria, apples produced on the same tree can be divided into up to nine grades, and the price difference is also thirty times. In order to standardize the screening of apples and ensure the stable quality of apples, he chose the world's most advanced Maf Roda fruit sorter.
After cleaning and polishing on the machine, each Apple passes through a constantly glowing device. "It's taking pictures of apples, and each apple takes 32 pictures." Song Nan introduced that through the high-frequency camera to take pictures of Apple, each photo corresponds to a data, including size, color, quality and so on. Then through the spectral sugar meter, the sugar content of each apple is determined, and after combining the above data, the machine will send the apples to different sorting lines to ensure that consumers receive apples of stable quality.
Based on the world's leading front-end planting and sorting lines, Song Nan has carried out more and more stringent standardization of agricultural products. At the beginning, high-quality apples were mainly sent to domestic high-end supermarkets. As the upward trend of agricultural products tilts towards online channels, Song Nan has turned her attention to the e-commerce platform.
Pinduoduo, which started with agricultural products, became the first e-commerce platform that Song Nan chose to cooperate with. In 2018, he began supplying Toto Orchard, shipping about 5,000 orders a day. Today, Yueduo Fruit Fresh Flagship Store is a 4-year-old store, and its sales volume has reached 100,000+.
Sprint branding: link Disney to create a high-end brand comparable to the "King of Apple"
After years of development, Rongcheng has summed up a set of modern and efficient apple cultivation models that adapt to mechanized operations, laying a solid industrial foundation. This provides Song Nan, who studied marketing, with the "thick snow long slope" of agricultural product brand building.
"Freckled Beauty" is the main apple brand of Yueduo Fruit on Pinduoduo. It is improved from the well-known variety of Wang Lin apple, although the appearance is ordinary, but the fragrance of apples, the sweetness of peaches, and the fragrance of pears moisturize the lungs.
In high-end supermarkets, "Freckled Beauty" is placed next to the "Aifei" apple. The English name for "Aifei" apple is Envy, which means the apple of being jealous. "Aifei" apple combines beauty and deliciousness, the price is expensive, known as the "king of apples". "Freckled Beauty" can be on a par with "Aifei", which also makes people see the growing strength of domestic apples.
This year, Yueduo Fruit has linked up with Disney to launch a Disney co-brand series. This is also Disney's first co-branded product in the field of agricultural apples. In addition to the "Disney Freckled Beauty" and "Disney Version of Red Fuji" that consumers are familiar with, there are also "Winnie the Pooh Golden Honey Fruit". The appearance of the "Venus-Golden Beauty" apple is like Winnie's honey jar, yellow and clear, and it looks sweet.
▲ "Winnie the Pooh Golden Honey Fruit" is a joint series between Yueduo and Disney. Infographic
With the opening of the market, the apples in Song Nan Orchard are becoming more and more widely sold. In Pinduoduo, in addition to the supply of Duoduo Orchard, due to the stable quality of the products, although the pricing is not cheap, the repurchase rate is quite high, the store has gained more and more traffic favor, and soon achieved sales of 100,000+.
"The needs of more than 800 million consumers are very diverse, and different entrances such as tens of billions of subsidies, tens of thousands of people, and second kills have gathered the different needs of consumers, and accurately docked the supply and consumption ends in the cloud, which is not only conducive to consumers to buy suitable products at affordable prices, but also helps the whole industry chain of the supply side to deepen product quality, help good products form good brands, and sell good prices." The person in charge of the Pinduoduo agricultural project was introduced.
On October 27, Pinduoduo joined hands with the six major apple producing areas in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Gansu, Sichuan and Xinjiang to open a half-month apple "Double 11". Song Nan said that the Yueduo Fruit Fresh Flagship Store has been selected for the Pinduoduo 10 billion subsidy session, and they will significantly increase the proportion of online sales, and operate wholeheartedly on the "world's largest single agricultural product market" composed of more than 800 million consumers in Pinduoduo, so that more consumers across the country can taste the high-quality apples directly from the origin.
▲ It has been 4 years of cooperation with Pinduoduo, and this year Song Nan decided to continue to increase the share of online sales, so that more consumers can taste the high-quality apples with straight hair in the place of origin. Li Hao | photo
Driven by online and offline channels, at present, Song Nan's apple planting park provides nearly 200 fixed jobs and 40,000 cyclical jobs, driving local villagers to increase employment and income. Song Nan also provides local farmers with support in apple planting, storage and sales, and drives surrounding farmers to get rich together.
"Listen, it's the apple tree calling for everyone to share." The end of Johnny Apple Seed says so. Johnny, who traveled west with apple seeds, planted faith and courage while planting apple trees; Song Nan, who returned to China with the "apple dream", planted the apple tree at the same time, but also planted the future and hope.