East China’s Jiangsu province has taken advantage of the regional characteristics in the past five years to boost the development of leisure and sightseeing agriculture to help the farmers get rich and make the villages more and more beautiful.
Family-owned farms in Jurong County are offering pick-your-own fruits for summertime family fun.
Picking your own is a great way to enjoy the day surrounded by beautiful fields of grapes, said Wang Yugen, a grape farm owner in Dingzhuang Village, Jurong County.
Wang used to be troubled by the sales of his grapes when he contracted 3.33 hectares of fields for grape cultivation in 2010 and had a trademark registered to promote the green food brand.
In 2015, Wang kicked off his agritainment business after building a landscape corridor, a winter garden and a landscape road in his vineyard in order to make the visitors stay on.
With the agritainment business flourishing, Wang’s daughter Wang Juan quit her job as an interior designer in Zhenjiang and returned home as a second-generation grape farmer to carve out her own path to success.
Wang Juan has made yoghurt with grapes by using the grapes and milk developed on her own farm. She has also set up a milk bar and a recreation area for children in the family’s winter garden. She is now planning to grow vegetables on the farm so as to offer pick-your-own vegetables when the grape season is over.
With the leisure and sightseeing agriculture gathering momentum, great changes have taken place in Dingzhuang where the greenery belts along the trunk road were revamped recently. The village has also rebuilt the parking lot, built a farming culture park and launched shared bike service.
Jiangsu now registers more than 7800 leisure farm and sightseeing agriculture parks, scenic spots and agritainment villages with the flow of visitors totaling 120 million at the end of last year, compared with 67.2 million at the end of 2012. The growth rate of the visitor flow is 78% while the comprehensive income growth range reached 85.2% at the end of last year with the income totaling 35 billion yuan, compared with 18.8 billion yuan at the end of 2012.
The province also leads the country concerning the number of the demonstration sites for leisure farm and sightseeing agriculture, the number of the beautiful and leisure villages at the national level and the comprehensive development index for creative and leisure farm and sightseeing agriculture.
