The rise of China's "Internet Farmers": rewriting the Map of Agricultural Development

In China's rural areas, where the spring tide of "Internet +" is surging, a new group, "Internet farmers", is rapidly forming. They come from different backgrounds and have different academic qualifications, including IT elites with annual salaries of hundreds of thousands, executives of state-owned and foreign enterprises, college student entrepreneurs and out-and-out farmers.

Although they have different experiences, they have similar contours.

They are the pioneers of the Internet tide. A young man born in the 1990s in Xiushan County, Chongqing, sells 2 million native eggs a year.

They are the new creators of the myth of creating wealth in rural areas. During the Dragon Boat Festival this year, Suichang County, Zhejiang Province, sold hundreds of thousands of "Changqing rice dumplings" online, unexpectedly selling out the county's glutinous rice.

-- they are growing at a geometric speed. At the beginning of last year, Xiushan County, located in the hinterland of Wuling Mountain area, did not have an e-commerce network, but now this number has soared to 178. By the end of this year, 267 administrative villages will be covered, and by the end of next year, it will be expanded to 71 surrounding counties and cities.

Experts believe that "Internet farmers" are becoming a new force in leading new farmers, developing new villages and supporting new agriculture.

Millions of "Internet farmers" give birth to trillions of markets.

Recently, in Dengyang Village, Pingkai Town, Xiushan County, Chongqing, Chen Tianyou, a 40-year-old farmer, walked into the Wuling Life Hall, an e-commerce service network with white characters on the blue floor next to the villagers' activity room, uncovered the shredded cloth on the bamboo basket to protect against rain, and handed over more than 30 earthy eggs to the "librarian" Yang Jun. Along the e-commerce service outlets and logistics systems all over Xiushan rural areas, these fresh native eggs converge to the county seat, and then through express delivery to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other big cities thousands of miles away. Today, more than half of the native eggs sold by farmers in Xiushan adopt this model, and the price of each egg is at least 2 yuan higher.

Cao Xibin, a 24-year-old scholar, used to be an investment manager at a fund company in Chongqing with an annual salary of hundreds of thousands of yuan. In April last year, Cao Xibin and two small partners came to Xiushan to set up an e-commerce platform called "Jiange Network." within a year, he sold 2 million Xiushan native eggs to all parts of the country and received millions of yuan of angel investment. "the only thing missing from the Internet is a native egg." this is a mantra that Cao Xibin often says. "native egg" refers to agricultural products.

Qingyuan Chicken, a specialty agricultural product in Qingyuan, Guangdong, produces about 50 million chickens a year. Last year's "Singles Day", under the packaging and promotion of the Qingyuan municipal government and Alibaba, the "Qingyuan Chicken" with e-commerce wings on the Tmall platform sold 10 million chickens a day. This perfect answer paper makes many people sigh that traditional farmers have been selling for three months, which is not as good as "net farmers" shouting for a day.

Tens of thousands of such "Internet farmers" have formed a large number of new groups. Data from Alibaba Research Institute show that at present, there are more than 1.6 million rural online stores registered on Taobao and Tmall platforms alone, and the national rural e-commerce sales exceeded 140 billion yuan last year. Xu Yuming, director of the Urban Development Research Institute of the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences, said that despite its rough scale, compared with the annual sales of 14 trillion yuan of e-commerce in China, rural e-commerce is still a blue ocean to be developed, and it will certainly catch up with and surpass urban e-commerce in the future. to become another trillion-level market.

Whether in Chongqing in the west, or in Anhui and Zhejiang in the middle and east, the stories of "Internet farmers" are amazing, inspiring and creative. Not only that, in some regions and industries, "net farmers" have become the "main force" in the production and sale of agricultural products.

In the mountainous area of southern Zhejiang, which is more than 1000 kilometers away from Xiushan County, Suichang County, which often experienced unsalable agricultural products a few years ago, now sells about 1x3 agricultural products in the county through the Internet. During the Dragon Boat Festival this year, Suichang County online Shop Association uniformly organized online marketing activities to sell Suichang characteristic native pork dumplings. Lin Songwen, vice president of the association, said that the online shop association specially looked for rural farmers, selected ingredients to package zongzi, and incorporated the cultural connotation of "lasting love" into the marketing activities of Suichang long rice dumplings. Hundreds of thousands of "long feelings rice dumplings" were sold during the festival, using up the glutinous rice in the whole county.

In some other industries, wonderful stories are also unfolding. 71 counties and cities in Wuling Mountain area where Xiushan County is located is one of the important producing areas of traditional Chinese medicine in China. Prior to this, traditional Chinese medicine in the region has been reversed by drug traffickers, making it difficult for ordinary drug farmers to get rich. In 2013, Tiandi Network of traditional Chinese Medicine settled in Xiushan, and most of the traditional Chinese medicine in the county realized direct transactions between farmers and merchants on the e-commerce platform, with a sales income of more than 30 million yuan last year. Today, Xiushan County has become the market price, circulation and other information release place of traditional Chinese medicine such as honeysuckle, and has mastered the market pricing power and the right to set industry quality standards.