Post-90s girl starts farming business in hometown

In October, the golden rice fields, where yellow rice ears flutter in the autumn wind, look like the vast golden sea in Ganyan Tujia Township, Cili County, Zhangjiajie City.

In 2020, Ning Fenfang resigned from the position in the village committee of Shuangyu Village in Cili County, and became a full-time farmer.

Over the past two years, Ning Fenfang transferred over 1,000 mu (about 66.67 hectares) of land and purchasedcultivators, drones, tractors, etc. “Since I chose to be a farmer, I will stick to it, regardless of the profits at the moment,” said Ning Fenfang.

Born in 1990, Ning Fenfang is a native of Changlinggang Village, Gangyan Tujia Township, Cili County. After returning to her hometown in 2017, she worked in the village committee at Shuanyu Village, mainly responsible for Party building, poverty alleviation and employment.

At that time, Cili County was still a national poverty-stricken county. In order to make a living, young people in the village went out to work to support their families.

"The village reclaimed several hundred mu (about 66.67 hectares) of land every year, for the superior governments had spent a lot of effort on rural land abandonment and management. However, the village's left-behind children and women do not have the time and energy to cultivate these lands, so weeds will still grow out on the reclaimed land next year. It is really a waste of resources," Ning Fenfang said. In 2020, she quit her job and became a new farmer.

Since 2020, Ning Fenfang has transferred thousands of mu (about 666.67 hectares) of land in Changlinggang Village and four other villages in the surrounding. She set up Cili County Fenfang Professional Planting and Breeding Cooperative, with all the land cultivated by mechanization.

"We invested 300,000 yuan to reclaim the land. And we need to pay 100-400 yuan/mu per year for the transferred land according to the location of the farmland and the distance from water sources," said Ning.

"Before the land transfer, planting was mainly done by manual labor with low efficiency in the county. Farmers as hardworking as my parents could only manage 20-30 mu (about 1.33-2 hectares) of lands." Ning Fenfang introduced.

In order to improve the efficiency of agricultural planting, she successively purchased semi-automated equipment such as harvesters, cultivators, rice transplanters and drones, and hired five professionals for long-term management.

Given the different quality of the transferred lands Ning decides that the best is used for the rotation of early rice and late rice, the average ones for the rotation of medium rice and rape seeds, and the poorest lands for planting corn.

"This year, affected by the drought, the yield is about 250-300 kilograms per mu, which decreases by about one-third." Considering that there must be years of hard time after reclamation, the villagers also agreed to give three years of free farming on the reclaimed land.

At present, the nearly 1,100 mu (about 73.33 hectares) of land transferred by Cili County Fenfang Professional Planting and Breeding Cooperative can drive the employment of nearly 900 local people each year, with a per capita income increase of more than 2,000 yuan.