From 'orange capital' to 'vegetable capital'

[SHADOW LI / CHINA DAILY]

To mitigate the risk of an unforeseen drop in their income, Lai told his wife to continue working at the Guangdong factory to ensure their family a stable monthly income of 7,000 yuan. He was prescient. Although the local government built the greenhouses for Lai and helped him secure an interest-free loan of more than 200,000 yuan for the first three years, two years after he came home, Lai, a novice in vegetable farming, could barely earn one-third of what he could from his factory job - 2,000 to 3,000 yuan a month - and he found that the interest-free period was too short as he could hardly make any money during the period.

To help prop up the industry, Xinfeng county of Ganzhou organized a conference in April for vegetable growers in the Greater Bay Area to exchange information. Official data showed that Ganzhou has so far raked in business contracts worth 16.8 billion yuan at the conference. Moreover, in Jiangxi, 33 farms are authorized to provide farm products, including vegetables, fruits and livestock, for the Greater Bay Area, and of those 33, 32 are in Ganzhou.

But the city still faces daunting challenges in its bid to fire up the agriculture industry, said Ming Jiaqi, head of the development and planning unit under the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of Ganzhou municipality.

The Greater Bay Area is an enormous market, and other places with a strong agricultural base are also eyeing the market, let alone those also with rich experience in e-commerce and already well-known to the customers in the 11-city cluster. For Ganzhou, e-commerce is still in its infancy, and the city needs to reach out to more customers to boost sales, he said.

Lai remains optimistic that despite the bumpy ride he has had, as he believes that every year is a new start for farming.

"I can always learn from last year's failure or bumps on the road and improve on them next year," he said. For him, his small vegetable farm could still be something that can support him and his family - while his son and daughter are in college and need support - for the next decade.

Lai's family is betting big on the farm, as is Ganzhou in the near future.

Li Bingcun contributed to this story.