"In the past, when we grew stevia we worried about low prices. Now that the processing plant is right at our doorstep, we know how much to plant, and transportation is convenient," said large grower Zhu Guochan recently as he looked over a green expanse of stevia at the stevia planting base in Qiaotou Town, Mingguang City, Anhui Province, full of expectation.

In recent years, Mingguang City has established processing plants in areas where local specialty agricultural products are concentrated. Because the factories are located close to the fields, freshly harvested products can be processed nearby and shipped directly across the country. With workshops adjacent to the fields, ordinary local produce is turned into specialty products — a flexible processing model locals vividly call "fieldside factories."

Building "fieldside factories" is Mingguang’s proactive attempt to adjust and optimize the agricultural product industry chain, mainly to address the past imbalance of "emphasizing planting while neglecting processing." How do the factories make up for these shortcomings? How do they boost incomes? To answer these questions, reporters recently visited Mingguang City.

Zhu Jie is chairman of Anhui Xingpu Biotechnology Co., Ltd. His company focuses on natural plant extracts and develops and produces a series of zero-calorie sweeteners made from stevia glycosides. As an entrepreneur who returned to his hometown, Zhu invested 50 million yuan last October to build an intelligent factory directly in the fields. The modern processing model and convenient logistics not only save the company transportation costs and ensure stable raw material quality, but also allow farmers to break free from the limitations of the traditional production-and-sales chain and truly share in the profits from processing.

"In the past, after stevia was harvested buyers would come pay 10 yuan per kilogram. Now we bring stevia to the nearby factory and can sell it for 15 yuan per kilogram, increasing income at the planting stage. The factory also hires us for processing work — we can earn four to five thousand yuan a month — so there are multiple income sources," villager Zhu Guochan told reporters.

After tasting the benefits of nearby processing and cutting out middlemen’s markups in stevia, Mingguang has replicated the "fieldside factory" model across more than a dozen rural industries such as fruits, vegetables and mugwort. The city has now built 29 "fieldside factories," driving collective annual income increases of over 13 million yuan in 15 villages and creating local jobs for 2,000 villagers.

Locally, a "share-link" approach has promoted cooperative development across noncontiguous plots: 135 villages formed joint share cooperatives, turning dispersed funds into pooled capital invested in high-quality projects. They established a fourfold distribution mechanism — "guaranteed purchase + profit sharing + wages + share returns" — so both collectives and villagers share in the development dividends.

Data show that last year 135 villages in Mingguang invested a total of 17.1 million yuan; 86 joint share cooperatives realized profits of more than 9.5 million yuan, and the growth rate of per-capita disposable income for rural residents jumped to first place in Chuzhou City.

Source: Anhui Daily