In the almost one year since he came to Wa, Wan Feng has been busy with his side jobs and has not made any suggestions regarding land and crops.
No matter what, farmers’ main business is farming, and they cannot lose sight of the main goal.
"Since no one wants it, just keep it on the team."
Zhang Hai blinked in confusion. "Why does the team keep it here? There's no one to tend to the land even if it's used for farming?"
"We can hire someone to take care of it or we can outsource it later. As for what to do, I remembered something when I was passing by Shancheng Commune today while having a meal."
Wan Feng expressed his regret that there were no vegetables during the hot pot meal at noon.
Zhang Hai didn't understand what Wan Feng meant by this.
"What do you think would happen if we grew vegetables in winter?"
"Growing vegetables in winter, if your idea isn't bullshit, I'll never do that again."
"You don't believe you can grow vegetables in winter?"
"People are shivering outside even in their cotton-padded jackets. The vegetable seeds will probably freeze to death if they're planted in the fields."
"We dug a winnowing basket-shaped pit along the hillside at Xiling, then used bamboo poles to build a frame and covered it with plastic. Do you still doubt that we can't grow vegetables in winter?"
"Build a greenhouse?" Zhang Hai exclaimed.
This was something that was just mentioned at the meeting of brigade and team cadres held by the commune yesterday, and today this little monster said that he wanted to build it?
He still hasn't figured out what's going on with the greenhouse.
"You said that vegetables can grow if you cover the bottom with a piece of plastic sheet? I always feel that this is not very reliable."
Of course you think it's unreliable if you haven't played with it.
"Of course it can grow. Anything can be grown in a greenhouse. How did you know about greenhouses?"
"The higher-ups held a meeting to discuss growing slippery mushrooms. They seemed to say that if there weren't enough houses, we could build greenhouses."
The slippery mushroom does not require direct sunlight but cannot do without scattered light. Therefore, when it was first cultivated in rural areas, it was all grown indoors. However, some families did not have spare rooms, so they could only build greenhouses in sheltered places and cover them with straw mats. Of course, this will only happen in the future, and the conditions are obviously not suitable now.
"Growing vegetables in a greenhouse is similar to growing slippery mushrooms, but growing vegetables is much easier. Slippery mushrooms require steaming and curtaining, whereas growing vegetables is just like growing vegetables at home. You just plant them and that's it. At most, you need to water them at regular intervals and put up and take down straw curtains in the morning and evening."
“What about the economic benefits?”
Whenever there is progress, the word economic benefit will be used.
Wan Feng nodded. "What do you think the market value of celery, leeks, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. would be if we could harvest them before the New Year?"
Zhang Hai had no idea about the market conditions and shook his head.
"If these vegetables were only worth two cents per pound in the summer, they should be worth a dime per pound now if sold in the city. One acre of greenhouse land is guaranteed to bring in more than one acre of land. Seventy or eighty yuan per crop is no problem, and you can harvest two or three crops a year."
"Can you earn 70 or 80 yuan from one acre of land?" Liang Wan asked in disbelief. Planting one acre of corn can only sell for more than ten yuan.
"That's just the money for one crop. If it's two crops, it's more than 100 yuan. What if you plant three crops?"
Liang Wan stopped talking, probably calculating how much money he could make from growing three crops.
"Nephew, we have hundreds of acres of wasteland. We can't build greenhouses all over it, right?"
Why not? The greenhouse of the future...
Forget it, let’s talk about it in the future.
"We can also build an orchard. Those mountains are of no other value anyway, so we might as well plant fruit trees there."
"Plant fruit trees!" Wu Cheng was the first to agree. His yard was already filled with fruit trees in a mess, including cherries, sweet pears, apples, and plums. They were all planted last year and have not borne fruit yet this year.
He just loves to talk about this stuff.
"It's all right to plant fruit trees, but what should we plant? Are we going to plant apples like everyone else?"
The fruit trees planted in many counties and cities in southern Liaoning are almost all apples, and the Jiangwei Brigade has a fruit tree team, which also mainly grows apples. It seems that you can never see which one is better than the other throughout the year.
"We don't plant apples, we plant yellow peaches. We plant all yellow peaches." Wan Feng said in a loud voice.
Now, these Guoguang apples will be replaced by the imported Red Fuji, Yellow Banana, Jonathan, etc. in a few years. If they plant apples now, when they bear fruit three years later, the Red Fujis may come in and they will be hit.
Zhang Hai was shocked. "Yellow peaches don't keep as long as apples after they ripen. What will we do with all these yellow peaches? And peach trees don't live as long as apple trees!"
If apples can live for fifty years, then yellow peaches can only live for twenty-five years at most. This may be the reason why there are fewer yellow peaches planted in the north than apples.
Wan Feng dared to say that he had already thought of a way out: "We can sell it to a cannery to make canned goods, or we can open a cannery ourselves. As for its lifespan, we can only let nature take its course."
In the 1980s, canned food was almost a must-have gift for visiting relatives and friends on the market, and its market size was still quite astonishing.
In addition to visiting relatives and friends, canned food also had medicinal uses in that era.
If people born in the 90s and 00s heard this statement, they would definitely laugh out loud. Canned food really cure diseases?
Wan Feng knew very well that canned food could indeed cure diseases, mainly children's diseases.
In the 1980s, some children got sick and injections and medicine didn't work, but they got cured after taking a can of medicine. Isn't that weird?
Finally, the adults gave this disease a unified name: gluttony.
Wan Feng also had it when he was a child, but that time the supply and marketing cooperative only had canned grapes, which were very unpalatable.
Although there are many varieties of canned foods, yellow peaches were still the main canned food in the 1980s. The sales of other canned foods were obviously not as good as yellow peaches, at least in the north.
This is also the reason why Wanfeng mainly promotes the planting of yellow peaches. Another reason is that yellow peaches are more valuable than apples.
The price of apples is four to five cents per pound, and yellow peaches are at least one to two cents more expensive than apples.
For example, during this year's peach harvest season, the supply and marketing cooperative's purchase price for yellow peaches was 6 cents for the first grade and 5 cents for the second grade, while the first grade apples were only 4.5 cents.
Most of the yellow peaches purchased by the supply and marketing cooperative were sent to the nearby Dongdan City cannery for processing. Dongdan City has a long history of canning, and even when canning declined 20 or 30 years later, there were still many canning processes there.
More than 30 years later, a local brand called Guangtian emerged there.
Therefore, there is no need to worry about the market for yellow peaches. Even if there is no purchase, you can process them yourself. The processing threshold is very low and there is no technical content. Perhaps the only difficult part is sealing the bottle.
"Okay, since you said yellow peach, let's plant yellow peach." Zhang Hai had some mysterious faith in Wan Feng's words, and he believed whatever Wan Feng said.
“Besides these two, what else can we develop?”
In addition to developing the planting industry, the next industry in rural areas is animal husbandry. Next, we can consider developing the animal husbandry industry.
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