The property of China Suichuan kumquat | a touch of nostalgia with 500 acres of ecological orange orchard

The Paper's reporter Yu Xiaodong

08:50

"Property China" Episode 8: "Kumquat Fragrance Out of the Mountains" (08:50)

Suichuan County, which belongs to Ji'an City, Jiangxi Province, is the core component of the Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base Area and one of the four major kumquat producing areas in China. The climate is mild, the sunshine is abundant, the frost-free period is long, and the overall terrain is mainly mountainous. The kumquat fruit from Suichuan is thin in skin and moderately sweet and sour in taste.

In December, it is the middle and late stage of Suichuan kumquat picking. Lu Xinping, a 51-year-old kumquat grower, is busy with workers in the warehouse, and on the same day, he wants to send a batch of kumquats to Hong Kong. Lu Xinping was not tall, with a strong figure and sharp eyes. As long as he is asked questions about kumquats, from industrial development to market development, he can tell them.

Before becoming a big local grower, Lu Xinping's business was actually not in Suichuan. In his early years, he and his wife worked in Xiamen. In order to alleviate his homesickness, in 2001, he began to brew his hometown's glutinous rice wine for sale in Xiamen, and after accumulating a certain reputation, a friend suggested that he make his hometown kumquat into wine. As a result, Lu Xinping and his wife returned to their hometown in Jiangxi in 2006 to develop a business, spent a lot of effort to develop kumquat brandy, and successfully applied for a patent.

With the changes in the domestic alcoholic beverage market, Lu Xinping decided to transform again, focusing on kumquat cultivation and deep processing of kumquat. When he found that Japanese kumquats could sell for 40 yuan a catty, but the taste was not as good as Suichuan kumquats, he realized that Suichuan's climate and geographical advantages should be used to develop ecological kumquat cultivation. On the one hand, Lu Xinping transferred the orchards contracted by local farmers to replant kumquats and re-employed these farmers; on the other hand, he established a mother garden for the purpose of cultivating kumquat seedlings, and the saplings called "alpine tall trees" in the garden were native varieties moved from the mountains and could supply seedlings to the whole suichuan county.

Lu Xinping knows that the key factor in determining the quality of kumquats lies in the land, so he insists on not using herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. In his plantation, there were many weeds, and his feet felt soft and soft; the fruit on the tree was not outstanding. Lu Xinping said that such a surface bears the function of water storage, which can prevent excessive rainfall of kumquats during heavy rainfall, and allow kumquats to tolerate drought when there is drought. At present, Lu Xinping operates a kumquat plantation with an area of 500 mu and an annual output of up to 50,000 kilograms. In addition to fresh fruits, more than ten kinds of deep-processed products such as kumquat lemon tea, kumquat loquat paste, and kumquat sydney pear paste are also sold in the domestic market.

With the successful case of Lu Xinping, more and more farmers have germinated the idea of kumquat entrepreneurship. Before returning to his hometown in 2013, Huang Zuohua, a "post-80s" boy, had his own computer shop in Shenzhen, undertaking sales and maintenance business, with a monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan. One day, he received a call from his brother: his hometown is engaged in the development of the kumquat industry, do you want to come back? Huang Zuohua was moved, so he returned to Suichuan. He realized that Suichuan's kumquat industry had to rely on young people returning to their hometowns to survive.

However, starting from scratch is not easy. In the first year of entrepreneurship, a friend became Huang Zuohua's partner, but quit the next year. After two years of starting a business, there was no benefit, and even Huang Zuohua's wife no longer supported it, but Huang Zuohua knew that it would take 3 to 4 years to produce benefits from planting. In 2016, the seedlings finally began to bear fruit, but the rainfall that year caused all the kumquats to crack and suffer heavy losses. It was not until 2017 that Huang Zuohua finally had a profit of 60,000 or 70,000 yuan.

Now, Huang Zuohua's kumquat is very popular because he also takes the ecological and environmental protection route. Some of the orders come from foreign fruit merchants, and some come from the county's e-commerce platform. In addition, there are tourists who go to his orchard to experience rural life to pick. Huang Zuohua's more than 30 acres of kumquat orchards plus five or six acres of sugar orange orchards created a profit of 140,000 yuan in 2019.

The eighth episode of the surging news "Property China" series of reports, into Suichuan County, Ji'an City, Jiangxi Province, tells the story of Suichuan entrepreneurs who are not moved by short-term interests and insist on green planting of kumquats.

Editor-in-Charge: Tian Chunling

Proofreader: Ding Xiao