On the morning of July 22, 2022, the villagers working in the vegetable planting base of Sun Vegetable and Fruit Professional Cooperative in Gaoshan Village were busy in picking vegetables or packing carefully, presenting a bustling scene with rows of long beans growing along the bamboo poles and plump eggplants hanging on the branches.

 

“About 1 ton of vegetables are picked every day for Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.” Cheng Lang said that the vegetables picked in the early morning can be served on the tables of residents in the Greater Bay Area at noon.

 

Thanks to the opening of Qingchu Highway along the Dongjiang Lake (from Qingjiang Town to Chukou Town in Zixing City) in May 2019, the traffic history of dependence on ships came to an end in Chukou Town.  

 

Born in 1986 in Zixing, Cheng Lang, who worked outside after graduating from university in 2012, returned home to work in 2014. Now he is a member of the CPC Party Committee and secretary of the Commission for Discipline Inspection of Chukou Town, shouldering the responsibility of supervising, guaranteeing, consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation, and contacting related villages for rural revitalization.    

 

“In the past, farmers had to rely on ships to transport their crops and sell them outside. It was so inconvenient that the economy could not develop.”

 

In Cheng’s opinion, the biggest change in the past 10 years is the highway through Chukou Town, which connects everything. All the changes are brought by the convenient highway, like the increasing number of fruit and vegetables in the mountains and a growing market for our products.

 

After the highway was opened, a number of migrant workers returned home to start their own businesses. The person in charge of the cooperative originally ran transportation in other places, and later returned to the village to grow vegetables.

 

He invested hundreds of thousands of yuan successively to build greenhouses with a total area of more than 7,000 square meters.

 

At present, there are many kinds of vegetables like eggplant, celery and pepper, achieving sales revenue of 250,000 yuan in the first half of this year and driving 12 local villagers to find jobs.

 

“According to the construction requirements of Chenzhou City to build the Greater Bay Area ‘vegetable basket’ base, we will implement unified supply of seedlings, management and care as well as sale to ensure product quality.”

 

According to Cheng, it is only by tightening the quality of agricultural products that green vegetables like bitter gourds and eggplants supplied by the cooperative can become popular on the dining tables of residents in the Greater Bay Area.

 

“In addition to the development of mountain vegetables covering tens of thousands of mu (1 mu equals about 0.07 hectares.), Chukou Town also relies on its own geographical advantages to develop Dongjiang tangerine, loquat, golden Nai-plum, eagle mouth peach and other fruits.

 

Now it is a characteristic fruit town, with tea in spring, loquat in summer, tangerine in autumn and Orah mandarin in winter.” Cheng introduced that about 80% of the fruit and vegetables in the town are sold to the Greater Bay Area.

 

Before the opening of Qingchu highway, the local tangerine per kilogram was priced about 1 yuan lower than that of the outside. While the price rose 1 yuan per kilogram after the highway was opened.

 

As the pillar industry of Chukou Town, tangerine industry alone has increased the income of villagers by more than 70 million yuan. According to the population of 13,900 in Chukou Town, per capita income has increased more than 5,000 yuan.

 

At the end of June this year, Chukou Branch of Zixing Rural Commercial Bank had a deposit balance of 323.31 million yuan. The per capita deposits reached 23,000 yuan. Compared with 10 years ago, per capita deposits increased by more than 15,000 yuan year on year.