NANCHANG: Oil-tea camellia seedlings farmer Yang Leren, together with other growers in his village, walked along ridges and furrows to weed a breeding field and put the weeds in his basket, being careful not to disturb the seedlings.
Yang lives in Fenyi County in east China’s Jiangxi Province. The 46-year-old man used to be a migrant worker but was incapacitated when he got his hands crushed in 2014. His family was plunged into poverty from then on. To help poor households increase their incomes, the county has been promoting oil-tea camellia seedlings planting since 2016 by introducing a scientific research team from the Experimental Center of Subtropical Forestry under the Chinese Academy of Forestry. That was when Dr. Zhong Qiuping, a member of the research team, set up his “poverty alleviation workshop” in Yang’s village, only a five-minute walk to the breeding field. “Relocating the workshop to the fields provides technical assistance to local farmers on one hand, and facilitates our research on the other,” Zhong said. When Zhong’s team decided to promote their research results to help lift the villagers out of poverty and increase income in 2018, the village cadres recalled that Yang’s family was the first that came to mind. Yet Yang did not buy it in the beginning since he did not think that he could increase income or even shake off poverty by growing oil-tea camellia seedlings. “At that time, our rice harvest barely made ends meet.” – Agencies
