Yantai firms drive agricultural restructuring

The city of Yantai in East China's Shandong province is famous for its fruit planting industry, especially its fresh apples and cherries.

However, over the past few years local farmers have been influenced by oversupply in the market, impacting the prices of their products.

To combat this, local food processing companies have been placing emphasis on industrial development and ensuring that local farmers enjoy maximum benefits from the fruit they grow.

The companies purchase farmers' agricultural products for prices that farmers can make a profit from, and then turn them into high-value products through deep processing. It relieves rural farmers of the trouble of looking for reliable wholesalers and further stimulates Yantai’s agricultural restructuring.

Andre Group is a giant producer of juices, pectins and other related products in Yantai. It invited agricultural technology experts to teach farmers professional planting skills like pest control at an apple-planting base launched in 2016.

In 2015 and 2016, Andre juice manufacturing factory operated several apple processing lines and purchased over 20,000 tons of unmarketable apples at 50 yuan ($7.57) more per ton than the market price.

Similar practices were also seen at Luhua Group, headquartered in Yantai. The company annually produces 1,500,000 tons of edible oil in 33 factories around the nation, benefiting more than 10 million peanut farmers.

Hengrun Foodstuff, which sells and processes agricultural products, invigorated a small village's agriculture through signing land transfer agreements with local farmers in 2017 to develop leisure agriculture.

Andre Group in Yantai, East China's Shandong province [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Oil products produced by Luhua Group, Yantai. [Photo by Chenying/chinadaily.com.cn]