Village benefits from agronomist training
Vegetable farming used to be an impossible mission in most parts of the Tibet autonomous region due to its high altitude and cold weather.
However, this began to change about two decades ago with the help of agronomists from the rest of country.
On one of the warming early summer days, Chen Qian, an agronomist from Central China’s Hubei province, held a training class in a greenhouse farm in the village of Charikha in Nyingchi city. Nyingchi is among the earliest cities in Tibet to develop a vegetablefarming industry.
“Reasonable spacing of crops is crucial as it is the quality, instead of quantity, of the produce that matters most in the marketplace,” Chen told local farmers attending the training. “Highquality vegetables can sell at prices several times higher than varieties with inferior quality.”
Chen, 51, is now the chief technical officer of a local vegetable-farming cooperative in
Nyingchi. He was among the vegetable-farming pioneers in Tibet when he came to the city 21 years ago.
He and his colleagues founded the cooperative in 2014. Since then, it has grown into a large entity that includes six farming bases and a company for processing and sales.
The farming base in Charikha village, consisting of 95 greenhouses, can produce 1.85 million short tons of vegetables a year. The vegetables can bring a total annual revenue of 9 million yuan ($1.35 million) to villagers.
According to Chen, the land of the cooperative farm has been rented from local villagers, who are given rental on an annual basis and also paid for their work on the farm.
Thonga, a resident in Charikha, said his family leased nearly 1 acre of land to the cooperative.
“My family was paid about 3,600 yuan as annual rental in the early years, and now the figure is more than 8,000 yuan,” Thonga said.
He added that other sources of family revenue include a yield from his own farm and the payment of part-time jobs on the cooperative farm.
“I’m paid more than 3,500 yuan a month when I work with the cooperative farm,” Thonga said. “It’s more important that we learned farming skills from the agronomists, as the cooperative gives training regularly.”
Dorje, head of the village, said local residents have benefited significantly from the farming cooperative.
“Of the 51 households in our village, 40 are paid 350,000 yuan in total annually from their land leased to the cooperative,”Dorje said.“People have also seen a substantial increase in revenue as they’ve worked with the cooperative or operated their own farms after learning skills from the cooperative’s agronomists.”
The village official noted that per capita net income of Charikha residents approximated 20,000 yuan last year.