Wealthiest village gets back to growing rice
Print Edition
LEAVING home — a spacious villa — Mei Zhenhua drives his Audi A6 to the rice farm in Huaxi, China’s wealthiest village.
The 34-year-old former metallurgy engineer has lived the agricultural life for the past 18 months, one of the seven “young smart intellectuals” selected by villagers to grow rice.
Huaxi in east China’s Jiangsu Province, about 130 kilometers from Shanghai, has been urbanized. With skyscrapers and a village-run aviation firm, it has accumulated wealth through the development of industries ranging from steel and chemical fiber, to banking, new energy, logistics and marine transport.
However, villagers are no longer satisfied with the wealth generated from industrial development, even feeling embarrassed that agriculture has nearly died out. Nobody wants to eat produce from the village’s 80 hectares of farmland, as it does not taste good.
In a decision agreed by 2,600 villagers in 2016, they gave 16 hectares of farmland to seven young people, college graduates aged 30 on average, to grow high-quality rice.
They were first sent to Asahi Noyu Farm in Japan to study how to grow high-quality rice, as none had farming experience.
“There is no secret in Japanese rice farming, only an artisan spirit in pursuit of perfection in each step of rice cultivation,” said Mei, a graduate from China’s Harbin Institute of Technology.
He said the problem with Chinese rice was a long-term focus on yield rather than taste and quality. Pollution in China due to years of industrial production has also damaged farmland.
The seven young farmers started growing rice in Huaxi in May 2016.
Mei said they were strict in each process, using traditional manual selection for good seed.
To ensure the water was clean, they dug a small reservoir near the field, where water is triple filtered before irrigating the farm.
The experimental field yielded only 60 tons of rice last year, with a per-unit output only half of a normal Chinese rice field. However, the rice won the gold award at Jiangsu’s rice appraisal and was soon sold out.
The village committee decided this year to give all the village’s 80 hectares of farmland to the seven farmers.
“Huaxi is after all a village. We cannot give up our agricultural roots,” said Wu Xie’en, Party chief of Huaxi.
Industrialization and urbanization had been seen as a measure of development for a rural town. But people are now worried that without agriculture, the village may lose its nature, Wu said. The village committee has spent 50 million yuan (US$7.3 million) on the rice cultivation program. In the next five years, it will continue to send young people to study rice farming in partnership with the Japanese farm.
Huaxi has given Shimizu Toyoyuki, Asahi Noyu Farm’s owner, the right to choose young candidates from the village to study in his farm.
Toyoyuki said he was surprised to see China’s wealthiest village send people to study rice growing, but understood that China and Japan had the same problem in that most young workers were no longer interested in farming.
The village’s current annual per capita income is over US$15,000, with each household having a villa and private cars. Villagers also enjoy subsidized health care, and over 2 million tourists visit every year.
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