According to the industrial layout of Guizhou Hongfa Ecological Agriculture Science and Technology Co., Ltd., Chenzhou has begun to build a tung oil industrial cluster. The company plans to plant 100,000 mu (about 6,666.67 hectares) of tung trees in Chenzhou in the next five years to develop the tung industry in a bid to turn barren mountains into ecological assets. The first batch of 5,000 mu (about 333.33 hectares) of tung trees will be planted this year.

 

Tung tree, one of the four major woody oil plants in China, is an important industrial oil tree species and strategic resource reserve tree species. In recent years, the exploitation and use of tung oil has been expanded, with its application in fields such as chemical, military, and electronics. It has broad market prospects.

 

Over the past decade, Yang Anren, chairman of Guizhou Hongfa, has overcome the major technical problem of tung wilt disease by collaborating with expert teams from Research Institute of Subtropical Forestry of Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing Forestry University, and Central South University of Forestry and Technology, and won the second prize of the 12th Liangxi Forestry Science and Technology Progress Award.

 

He also established an enterprise engaged in the production and sales of tung oil, and built a base for tung oil resistant to wilt disease as well as a national tung germplasm resource database. The “breeding technology and application of tung oil resistant varieties” has been promoted to Guizhou, Chongqing, Sichuan and other places to boost income for forest farmers in mountainous areas. He also won honors such as the 27th China Youth May Fourth Medal and the first “National Rural Revitalization Youth Pioneer” in 2021.

 

“We have broken through the problems of the lifespan and yield of tung oil, achieving a significant increase of 3 to 6 times in tung oil production. This is also the key core to drive tung oil cultivation and achieve common prosperity,” said Yang Anren. The soil in the southern Hunan is mostly slightly acidic sandy, and some barren mountains are not fit for planting economic crops, but it is more suitable to plant tung trees. After preliminary communication with Chenzhou, cooperative development models have been preliminarily established.

 

Grown-up tung trees can achieve 10,000 yuan of the output value per mu (about 0.067 hectares). Huang Kai, Party secretary of of Hexie Village in Guiyang County, said that through large-scale cultivation of tung trees, it is expected that the village can provide more than 160 jobs in the forest farm each year, with an additional income of 20,000 yuan per capita for the villagers each year. 

 

The company proposed to build a demonstration forest for tung tree disease resistance in Chenzhou and promote the mechanism of “enterprise plus cooperative plus farmer”. Next, it will also build a tung oil exhibition park, a deep processing project, and a research center, striving to create a Chinese tung oil industry cluster and a new model for promoting rural revitalization through the tung oil industry in Chenzhou.