Girls born in the 1980s grow vegetables at sky-high prices

Don't be a "cubicle worker"

In Beijing, a bit of green is a luxury, but in a valley under the Wild Boar ridge in Daxing County, your correspondent found a lush world like a peach garden. Red tomatoes, prickly cucumbers, golden round "Yellow River honey", large fruit trees full of various fruits. This is Zhang Yin's organic farm, which covers more than 300 mu.

Not far away, a stream meandered by. Scattered nearby are a cluster of European-style wooden houses owned by foreigners who follow Ms. Zhang, including engineers, actors and bosses of large companies.

Four years ago, Zhang Yin was an IT beauty in Zhongguancun. At 26, she had become a sales executive. But when it comes to the essence of this halo, the girl directly explains that she is a "handyman" and "I have to worry about everything from administrative expenses to meeting arrangements to marketing activities and client maintenance."

Working until one or two in the morning was commonplace; When she was lying in bed with cervical spondylosis, she controlled the details of marketing campaigns. On a rare annual leave, it's 2am in Vienna and I'm woken up by a phone call from a client. To this, she can only but wry smile: "Escape so far, still be chased by work pressure. A lot of foreigners can literally throw their work away when they go on holiday, but I can't."

It was not until that day that Zhang Yin woke up after hearing of a girl's sudden death due to excessive fatigue. She thought sadly: the so-called white collar, though dressed well, is just a poor worker ant in the cubicle, eventually either fell in the cubicle, or on the way to the cubicle......

In order to eliminate the heart of depression, she and her boyfriend ran to the outskirts of Beijing in the mountains crazy play. While chatting with a mountain sister-in-law, Zhang Yin said with emotion: "The air here is so good, which is not like sitting in the office all day stuffy, if possible, I really want to live in the countryside for a period of time. Besides, farming can not only exercise physical strength, but also eat their own vegetables, that feeling must be very cool!" Her sister-in-law smiled and said, "That's not easy. We have a lot of land here. All the young people have gone out to work. "If you could invest here and build a farm to grow vegetables, you might even make a lot of money!" The other side inadvertently in a word, let Zhang Yin's eyes not by suddenly bright. What is more interesting is that she heard that Chen Paise, a famous comedian who has experienced ups and downs in his life, is living in the mountains not far from here with his wife to plant trees.

Organic vegetables dump foreigners in Beijing

In early 2008, Zhang quickly rented 100 mu of land at a price of 600 yuan per mu. The rent is not much, but to actually build a farm, it requires a staggering amount of capital investment. Such as hiring workers, building houses, putting up greenhouses, buying irrigation equipment and so on. One day, when she was worried about how to raise money, her boyfriend joked that he would invite all his friends to his house for dinner in the evening and let them come up with ideas. Maybe some people would be willing to invest.

Perhaps it is because we have lived in the city for a long time and have been fed up with pesticide residues and exhaust pollution. When we heard that Zhang Yin wanted to run an organic farm in the mountains, we all felt fresh and excited. In the meantime, Zhang Yin's good friend Ms. Catley was more interested in it. She said that she was born in a farmer's family in the north of France, worked as an agronomist, and had a good knowledge of fruit and vegetable planting and management. A few years ago, she went to Beijing with her husband to open a company. Since she had a child, she has become a full-time wife.

The mountain flowers are in full bloom, the stream is crystal clear, and the air is as pure as filtered. When they visited Boar Ridge, Keightley and her husband were immediately struck by its almost pristine beauty. They decided on the spot to invest $200,000 and set up home on the farm. It was a big surprise for Zhang Yin!

A blonde lady, a smartly dressed little girl, they know how to farm? Before long, nearby villagers had their eyes open. Zhang Yin and her workers had built a steel-framed greenhouse, with irrigation equipment imported from Israel, and a specially built rainwater collection device on the ground. Farmers can't grow vegetables without chemical fertilizers such as urea and phosphate fertilizer. Zhang Yin uses fermented and sterilized human and animal manure and plant ash. In her words, these are "earthworm fertilizer". In addition, there are many rules on the farm, such as the use of pesticides, ripening agents, herbicides and so on.

These are most easily seen by outsiders, and behind the scenes, is the precise grasp and quality control of vegetable growth. Take Shanghai Green as an example. Here, 180,000 plants are planted in each mu of land, each plant is 5 centimeters apart, harvested in 22 days, and each plant weighs 8 to 12 grams. "A lot of people ask me, how do you set a quality standard for a dish? In fact, the weight error of vegetables produced in a standardized way is only about 5 percent. In the case of tomatoes, Ms. Zhang even specified how much fruit to hang on each plant, and any excess had to be cut off to ensure quality. Unlike regular tomatoes, which are soft and fluffy, organic farm tomatoes are crispy and juicy. Zhang Yin says it's natural. In addition, its sweetness can reach 11, which is close to the sweetness of a watermelon.

Celery is one of the most common dishes, but local mountain people found that Zhang Yin's celery is almost hollow, without tendons but very straight and fresh water. Zhang explained that because organic vegetables are grown without pesticides, fertilizers and auxin, they better retain their natural taste and delicious quality.

Although the organic vegetables produced by Zhang Yin usually sell for more than 10 to 20 to 30 yuan per kilogram, which is several times or even more than 10 times the price of ordinary vegetables, they are especially popular in the market. Many large Western restaurants and star hotels will directly drive trucks to Tiantou procurement.

Unlike other farms, Zhang Yin's employees are deliberately not skilled. "Some experts can do their own magic to make vegetables grow faster and better, but my belief is to grow all natural." In the first year, Zhang's farm made a profit of more than 600,000 yuan.

Promote the CSA farm model in China

When IN THE HOME, ZHANG Yin IS ALMOST A "FIVE GRAIN DOES NOT DIVIDE" GIRL, DO NOT SAY TO PLANT VEGETABLE MORE, INCLUDE GREENHOUSE TO CULTIVATE VEGETABLE SEEDLINGS NOW, EVEN DRIVE SMALL TRACTOR TO WAIT, SHE IS MASTER OF EVERYTHING. The old white hands had been tanned, and there was even a thick cocoon in the palm. During the interview, Zhang told a joke to the reporter: The first time she saw flax in a potato field, she praised its beauty from the inside. But soon the plant, with its purple and blue flowers, began to annoy her. Because no herbicides can be used to grow organic vegetables, the thorny weeds have to be pulled by hand, "face to the earth and back to the sky."

Through her organic farm, Zhang has met many "green-collar" environmentalists. One of her clients, a British woman who used to order from Ms. Zhang, simply moved here with her husband when she became pregnant. Later, the couple set up an English-language website to introduce Ms. Zhang's organic farm to fellow Europeans in Beijing.

In March 2009, the British Department of Agriculture held a vegetable base selection activity, under their introduction, Zhang Yin was invited to Britain for investigation. The girl cherishes the opportunity to learn advanced technology. Everywhere she went, she asked the translator to explain the expert's words in detail, and then she made a detailed record. At a vegetable base in Wales, Zhang was really eye-opening. The base had strict requirements on site selection, vegetable cultivation, management and distribution, which she had never heard before in China.

After returning from the UK, Zhang imported more than 30 kinds of fashionable vegetables from Europe at one go, and made another large profit. In addition, she found that CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm marketing model is very popular abroad. At the beginning of the growing season, consumers pay the farmers upfront, and the farmers guarantee that their produce will be 100 percent organic and deliver the healthy food directly to the subscribers' homes, avoiding the middleman. In this way, food safety can be guaranteed to the greatest extent in the form of legal contracts.

This spring, Ms. Zhang, who expanded her farm to 300 acres, began trying to popularize the CSA model in China. One of the biggest challenges is convincing subscribers that what you're growing is green and healthy. In addition to the laboratory report issued by the authority department, the girl also took photos of the whole process of producing organic vegetables on the farm and put them on the Internet. Customers are welcome to observe the vegetable field at any time and even participate in the labor directly.

Today, Zhang has more than 2 million yuan. In an interview recently, she told reporters that she is also planning to invest heavily in the picturesque valley to open a tourist resort. By then, business will be very hot! Sipping jasmine tea, the girl said this with confidence and passion on her face.