Innovative farmer switches nuts to protect ecology

Villagers thought Chen Xijin was nuts — in more ways than one — when he felled all his chestnut trees in Liaoning province in 2006.

And his decision to switch his cash crop of choice to a different nut was not popular at first with his wife, Tang Xiufen. “How can we make a living without the chestnuts?” Tang recalled saying at the time, as she could not understand why he had replaced nearly 4.5 hectares of chestnut trees with pine saplings.

But after 12 years, Chen’s saplings have grown into a thriving pine forest, and he earned more than 60,000 yuan ($9,400) last year by selling pine nuts.

Chen’s village is tucked away in the mountains where there is little arable land for grains, so chestnuts were a major source of income for more than 40 years.

When Chen was elected village head in 2004, he found chestnuts were destroying his hometown.

“To get to the thirsty trees, we needed to eradicate other vegetation before harvesting chestnuts, which causes severe soil erosion during the rainy season. The village would ultimately become surrounded by bare hills covered with rocks and sand. I was determined to never allow that to happen again,” Chen said.

The virgin coniferous forests in the mountains inspired him. He knew pines could retain topsoil and water thanks to their deeper roots, and their nuts were popular in markets.

However, it takes nearly 20 years for wild pines to produce nuts, and the financially struggling villagers seemed reluctant to wait.

So Chen and his colleagues asked a local forestry institute for help. Experts told him newly developed grafted pines could halve the time it took to start producing nuts. With this knowledge in hand, Chen grafted 30 scions onto wild pine saplings.

“I knew it was risky to replace chestnuts with pines, but I had no choice,” he said. “There was less concern about environmental protection in the past. But soil loss had been a severe problem for all of us in the village. Nobody can live on rocks.”

Chen was confident that pines could save his village. He decided to set an example for his fellow villagers by cutting down his own chestnut trees.

However, the villagers still hesitated after seeing Chen’s grafted pines survive. After all, chestnuts had supported their families for decades.

Chen understood and suggested they plant pines under their chestnut trees.

“We wouldn’t cut the chestnuts until the pines grew big enough to bear fruit so that villagers could have stable incomes and the environment could recover gradually,” Chen said.

Soon, 530 hectares of pines were planted alongside the chestnut trees. A dozen years later, the cultivation area of pines has almost doubled. In the meantime, the chestnut tree cultivation area has shrunk to a little over 100 hectares, down from nearly 900 at its peak.

For villagers, pines have already become an even more lucrative source of income than chestnuts. But for Chen, they are indicative of the villagers’ rising environmental awareness. “We are children of the mountains. We take everything we have from them, so we must protect them better,” he said. “Clean water and lush forests are invaluable assets to us.”