Workers in the cooperative wash, sort, and pack cherry tomatoes. Photo courtesy of the interviewee.
In the fields, rows of cherry tomatoes are lush and green, and the cherry tomatoes are like jewels adorning the branches, which are particularly dazzling in the sun. Recently, the cherry tomatoes planted in Changshan Village, Mata Town, Dianbai District, Maoming City have entered the mature harvest period, and dozens of villagers are cleaning, sorting, packing and other work in Changshan Village, striving to package and ship the purchased cherry tomatoes as soon as possible.
This year, cherry tomato planting ushered in a 'good start', and the current purchase price reached about 10 yuan a catty!Qiu Qiru, the leader of the villager group surnamed Qiu Village in Changshan Village, a partner of the cooperative, and a large cherry tomato grower, said excitedly, "This year's cherry tomatoes are good, and fruit merchants from other places have contacted us early to purchase." Since the beginning of December, we have been buying thousands of catties of cherry tomatoes from Tiantou every day, and selling them to fruit wholesale markets in Tianjin and other places after centralized packaging here. ”
In recent years, Mata Town has taken the development and growth of professional farmer cooperatives as a breakthrough, actively promoted the "party building + cooperatives" model, adopted the methods of "big cooperatives" and "small cooperatives", and introduced large rural farmers, technical talents, and farmer brokers with expertise into professional farmer cooperatives, and used their own advantages in technology, capital, and marketing to organize farmers and actively explore new ways to help farmers increase income and get rich, and promote rural revitalization.
Among them, Changshan Village adheres to the development concept of ecological agriculture, green agriculture and quality agriculture, adopts the development model of "party building + cooperatives", takes village cadres and villager group leaders as planting leaders, and takes agricultural cooperatives as the carrier, and has embarked on a road of agricultural industrialization, scale and brand development, and has developed the small cherry tomatoes into the second largest planting industry in addition to rice, making it a "rich fruit" for farmers.
Since the introduction of cherry tomato planting in 2019, the planting area of cherry tomatoes in Changshan Village has increased from a few acres to more than 700 acres today, forming a large-scale, intensive and standardized planting advantage. From the end of each year to the beginning of the next year, Changshan Village has a mild climate, abundant sunshine, a large temperature difference between day and night, and fertile soil, and the "millennium" cherry tomatoes planted are large, sweet and crisp, which are well received by the market.
This year, the cherry tomatoes are growing well, and the villagers are busy fertilizing, pruning, picking, and using scientific methods such as unified irrigation and ultrasonic repellent to drive birds and insects to plant. "I rented 60 acres of land this year to plant cherry tomatoes, although the planting began in September due to the heavy rain disaster, the plant has been lost, but in general the planting situation is good, now into the picking period per mu yield has been hundreds of catties, is expected to reach more than 4,000 catties per mu of the annual output. Qiu Qiru introduced.
In addition to making growers rich and increasing income, cherry tomatoes planting, sorting, packaging and other links have also effectively solved the employment problem of left-behind women in Changshan Village. During the cherry tomato harvest season, at least one farmer needs to be hired to pick every two acres of land, and 40 people need to work at the same time for each sorting belt, which provides hundreds of jobs for nearby villagers.
Deng Jianqing, Wang Xiayu, Zhu Jian.