In April 2023, Mr. Gu from Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, spent 65 yuan online to buy 50 grams of hair cabbage, and after receiving the goods, he found that it was not the same as the synthetic hair cabbage he usually bought, and suspected that it was wild hair cabbage, so he called the police. Later, it was identified that the hair cabbage did belong to the national first-class protected plant - wild hair cabbage. Recently, Tian was sentenced for the crime of endangering national key protected plants. After investigation, the owner Tian opened two shops on the Internet, and sold them under the banner of original ecological native products after purchasing fat cabbage from other places, and in less than two years, the number of wild hair cabbage illegally purchased was not less than 61.1 kilograms, and the sales amount was not less than 34,000 yuan. In the end, considering that Tian pleaded guilty and accepted punishment and paid the cost of ecological and environmental damage, the court sentenced Tian to 10 months in prison, suspended for 1 year, and fined 5,000 yuan for the crime of endangering national key protected plants.
Fatcho, also known as Candida hairiformis, an algae of the order Candida cyanobacteria, is a wild terrestrial algae unique to the plateau, growing in arid and semi-arid land barren areas at an altitude of 1000-2800 meters, mainly distributed in the grassland of northern China, the main production areas are Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Ningxia, Hebei and so on. Because it resembles human hair and is as thin as a hair, it is commonly known as a hair vegetable.
Fa Cai reads a lot like "fortune", which is one of the reasons why some people like it.
The Forestry and Grassland Bureau of the Sunit Left Banner of the Xilin Gol League of Inner Mongolia once revealed in a popular science article: The damage of harvesting hair cabbage is extremely great, and after investigation and calculation, every 2 taels of hair cabbage collected will destroy the grassland equivalent to the area of 16 football fields. Everywhere the diggers went, a large area of sand-fixing vegetation was uprooted and burned for cooking and heating, and the square garden where they lived was bare for several hundred meters, causing a large area of grassland soil erosion, and the originally very fragile ecological environment was further deteriorated, accelerating the desertification of the grassland and the extinction of some rare species, affecting the normal production and life of farmers and herdsmen.
In order to further strengthen protection, on September 7, 2021, Fa Choi was included in the "List of National Key Protected Wild Plants", with a protection level of Class I, and illegal collection and sale are prohibited.
Source: Farmer's Daily