Chapter 286 Dry glory
In July 1994, when the wind blew golden wheat husks dancing in the sun, the World Cup in the United States had come to an end, and the bell for the end of the college entrance examination disappeared in the laughter and crying of young people. The first large-scale celestial body collision observable by mankind since the invention of the telescope was already taking place. 7 pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 21 were crashing into Jupiter at a speed of 9 kilometers per second. It was like a long train running in the depths of the universe, exploding 60 billion atomic bombs continuously.

Scientists say: It provides a golden opportunity for mankind to understand the mysteries of the universe more deeply and reveal the origin and evolution of life on Earth. However, the Eastern nation, where more than half of the population is illiterate, still has 10 billion people who do not know how to look up at the stars. They do not believe in God, they are down-to-earth, and they quietly work on the land, working in this era of gradually getting richer, eliminating illiteracy, explosively advancing the quasi-information society, and modernization step by step towards the people, and seeing light and hope.

In July 1994, Lin Shiyu came to Yunxi Village with harvest and hope.

She was asked by Zhang Yunqi to write a report about the Longjingyuan Cannery, but after a preliminary understanding of the Longjingyuan Cannery, she changed her mind and decided to write about the Yunxi Village that was thriving and full of hope as described in the documents.

At this time, Yunxi Village is in the best time of the year. The temperature is neither too cold nor too hot, and fruits and grains are ripe. The ditches and hills are full of deep and light green. There was a heavy rain a few days ago, and the Crescent River is much more prosperous than in previous years. In some narrow parts of the river, the water is surging and rumbling through the village in July. The autumn harvest has slowly begun: harvesting tobacco leaves, picking red dates, cutting mid-season rice, picking peanuts, pulling up soybeans... Everywhere is a prosperous and lively rural scene.

On the day Lin Shiyu and the photographer from Southern Hunan Daily arrived in Yunxi Village, after dinner, Zhang Haijun, the village director of Yunxi Village and chairman of the cooperative, took her to the planting base. The planting base is located at the foot of Jiangjunling and is very large. The relatively contiguous standardized planting area is as large as 1200 acres. The crop is Fengyang's famous Fangyuan pepper. Now is the color change period of the pepper. The green and red peppers are hanging on the branches. The farmers hired by the cooperative are harvesting them, and the harvest will continue until November.

Zhang Haijun introduced to her that this pepper planting base is a key project of the Yunxi Village Shareholding Agricultural Crop Professional Planting Cooperative. It adopts a composite operating cooperation model of "cooperative + company + base + farmers + land dividends + labor income". All the peppers produced are sold to the Longjingyuan Canning Factory under Liansheng.

At present, the income of farmers in Yunxi Village is divided into four parts: land dividends, labor income, year-end dividends and sales income of scattered soybeans based on the underwriting contract of Longjingyuan Canning Factory. This year, after deducting the income from farmers' self-grown tobacco, the average additional income of 68 households for the whole year will not be less than 3000 yuan, and all villagers in Yunxi Village will be lifted out of poverty by the end of this year.

Lin Shiyu smiled and praised: "The whole village has been lifted out of poverty. Village Chief Zhang, you, as the leader of Yunxi Village, have made a great contribution."

Zhang Haijun waved his hands quickly: "What kind of leader am I? Our village can be what it is today, all thanks to Yunqi. He is our leader and the great hero!"

Lin Shiyu smiled and shook her head, feeling a little resentful.

Zhang Yunqi tricked her into doing this report last month. He had agreed to accompany her, but he disappeared. His father, Old Man Zhang, told her that Zhang Yunqi is now accompanying a girl named Chu Jian in the hospital. She had thought that he, as a big boss, was working day and night for Liansheng's grand blueprint, but she didn't expect it was just a romantic relationship...

The next day, Lin Shiyu attended a coordination meeting for the construction of the Longjingyuan processing and production park, which was led by the Fengyang County Government and hosted by Liansheng and Longwan Town.

Li Jilin, general manager of Liansheng, made it clear at the meeting that he would invest 1000 million yuan in the initial stage of this project. He also introduced Liansheng's future plans, connecting three production lines, building a pig breeding base and a Lingwu duck breeding base, and launching Fengyang jar meat and Jiangchuan Lingwu duck series of special new products in the national market next year, making it and Zhangji Qifengdu fish meal the three business cards of Jiangchuan's external publicity.

Based on this goal, Longjingyuan Canning Factory will be based in Yunxi Village's shareholding crop professional planting cooperative, radiating to 18 administrative villages and 42878 farmers in Longwan Town, and ordering 1600 tons of soybeans and 300 tons of peanuts from farmers in the town under a special sales contract + scattered planting model, benefiting no less than 1000 farmers, with each farmer receiving an additional annual income of no less than 1000 yuan, providing thousands of jobs, and driving the development of surrounding supporting industries such as catering and transportation, helping nearly farmers to initially solve the problem of food and clothing.

This plan is truly grand for the impoverished Longwan Town. The government leaders present were very excited and kept emphasizing that the government would fully cooperate with Liansheng to improve the roadbed and facilities from Longwan Town to Yunxi Village. The initial plan was to transfer a 150-acre site to Liansheng within half a month, level the land, build a production and processing park, and fully support Longjingyuan's plan to build a pig breeding base and Lingwu duck breeding base.

Lin Shiyu made a brief record of these contents, and then interviewed them one by one, including the general manager and senior executives of Liansheng, the county magistrate of Fengyang County, the mayor of Longwan Town, and the village secretary of Yunxi Village. She heard a lot of constructive words about the future and preliminary ideas for fighting for the benefits of the people, but this was not the core that she wanted very much, although she was not sure what she wanted specifically.

This time, he planned to stay in Yunxi Village for five days for the interview, so he had plenty of time. Lin Shiyu was born and raised in Lijin, the provincial capital. After becoming a reporter for a provincial newspaper, he often traveled around the country, so he was not uncomfortable with life in the countryside.

During those days, Lin Shiyu observed that the people of Yunxi Village were quite different from those of the neighboring villages. In the eyes of the people of the neighboring villages, the people of Yunxi Village were like crazy, getting up early and working late to harvest tobacco leaves, plowing the fields and planting rice seedlings, and rushing to harvest soybeans in the fields in time, filling their schedules. Not only did they use hoes to dig up all the land that had been abandoned for many years, they also ran to the mountains allocated to the group to reclaim wasteland, made the reclaimed land as soft as cotton bags, scraped the edges as clean as if licked by a dog, and applied fertilizer from their own homes.

All they did was to prepare for the planting of soybeans that the cooperative planned to distribute to each household next year. Whenever they had free time, they would work part-time at the cooperative's pepper production base and earn labor fees.

The Yunxi Village Cooperative was set up by Zhang Yunqi, a phoenix that flew out of the mountain nest, in his hometown. The first phase only benefited 68 households in the village. The poor and idle people in the neighboring villages could not get these benefits, so they were inevitably jealous. When chatting with her, they kept saying to her that it was incredible. If they continued like this, in a few years, many families in Yunxi Village would become rich!

Everyone seems to be full of hope for the future development of Yunxi Village. This is what Lin Shiyu felt after interviewing many villagers. However, in the eyes of Lin Shiyu, who is used to luxurious life, their current life is not good, and it is also very vulgar. They seem to be living not to enjoy, but to endure. They work in the fields day and night, and they are satisfied to fill their stomachs. However, they do not have the anxiety and uneasiness of city people. Their faces full of vicissitudes still have clear eyes.

Lin Shiyu is not a pessimist, she is happy to make progress. One afternoon, she went to the land that was being planned to build a processing park for Longjingyuan to scout the landscape. On the way back, she met a middle-aged man. The man was a cripple, pulling a cart of soybeans. He might be tired, so he took off his sweat shirt and sat on a stone by the muddy road to smoke a dry pipe.

Maybe it was the nature of a reporter, Lin Shiyu subconsciously wanted to chat with him, walked over and sat on the stone next to him, and asked with a smile: "Brother, where are you going to send the soybeans?"

The middle-aged man probably knew that she was a big reporter from the provincial capital, so he was reserved and stammered, "Village, the cooperative in the village."

Lin Shiyu asked: "How much is the purchase price of soybeans? How much can the villagers usually sell them for?"

"1 yuan per pound. How much you can sell it for depends on how much land you have. Yunqi takes care of our villagers and takes whatever he can get. For example, I have 2 mu and 3 centimeters of land and can produce more than 2 pounds of soybeans. I estimate it to be more than 1300 yuan."

Lin Shiyu is familiar with these data. She chats about them mainly to create a comfortable atmosphere for chatting. She smiled and said: "This income is not low."

The middle-aged man waved his hand: "This is nothing, this is just part of it. The pepper base in our village has my land, so I can get dividends from the land. I also invested in the cooperative, and there will be dividends at the end of the year."

He became excited when talking about this, and he was no longer reserved: "I have a weak leg, but the villagers took care of me and let me clean the cooperative. I only need to go there once in the morning and afternoon, and I can get paid for my work without affecting my farm work! Oh, our village has changed so much in the past year! Ever since Yunqi started this cooperative, every household has found a way forward."

Lin Shiyu smiled: "So what do you think of Zhang Yunqi?"

The middle-aged man took a puff of cigarette and said with a smile: "How can I explain this? If you pick anyone out of the village, you can say a lot of good things about him. I am the same! Anyway, Yunqi can do practical things for us hometown people. Whether a person is crooked or good depends on how much practical things he has done. It won't work if some leading cadres brag and take credit for themselves. It can't solve the problem. To put it in a broader sense, from ancient times to the present, which dynasty has achieved success by doing this? We Chinese people don't believe in God! But let me think about it. There are more than 8 million farmers in our country. If you don't work hard and don't do practical things, everyone will get up early and stay up late to dig in the fields, but still can't have enough food after a year. This, this is called..."

“There is no idle land in the world, but farmers still starve to death?”

"Yes, that's right!" The middle-aged man nodded continuously, "People with intellectuals are still smart. There is no idle land in the world, but farmers still starve to death. We farmers spend our whole lives planting crops in the soil, but we don't know how many times we have gone hungry."

Lin Shiyu asked: "Why?"

The middle-aged man grinned, his white teeth shining: "How can we, the peasants, understand this? I only know how to farm. But at the end of last year, Yunqi said something at the cooperative preparatory meeting, and I think it makes sense. He said that just because the whole country is running forward, we can't ignore those who are knocked down."

Lin Shiyu didn't speak for a long time.

It was getting late. The middle-aged man rolled up his pipe and stomped it out under his feet, then said goodbye to her. He dragged his lame leg and staggered along the scorching road, pushing a cart loaded with bulging soybeans.

On the road, the folks who were returning from delivering soybeans to the cooperative walked briskly and leisurely, like old oxen unbridled.

The earth stretches out infinitely, and wild grass grows all over the slopes.

There is a time for growth and a time for decline, but life never ends.

******
(End of this chapter)