New agriculture has in recent years been a significant focus for Nanjing, given the considerable rural resources at the City’s disposal. One crop in particular has proved a winner; blueberries now being exported far and wide have become a key economic driver.
Last year, sales from Nanjing-produced blueberries exceeded ¥100 million. Several batches of high-quality blueberries were even exported to the USA, Europe, Japan and other countries.
On 6 June, a reporter for Nanjing Daily visited the Lishui Liang Organic Blueberry Planting Base. Jiang Zhangcai, who overseas planting management, revealed that each tree shall consumes approximately 20-25 kilograms of organic fertiliser.
“A sapling pit is about 50 centimetres deep and 50 centimetres wide. Organic fertiliser helps us to ensure the organic-matter content of the soil”, said Jiang. “Compared with blueberries grown using chemical fertilisers, with organic blueberries, not only is the fruit bigger, but its nutritional value and taste are much better.”
Liang Organic Blueberry is the first enterprise to grow organic blueberries in Lishui District of Nanjing. It is also one of the few such local producers to have passed certification for the EU, USA and Japan.
The blossoming of blueberry farming is not just an ecological equation, it’s also a purely economic matter. The cost of organic planting is twice that of traditional planting methods, but the income derived therefrom is more than double.
In the long run, planting costs shall continue to some down; hence retail investors and enterprises are now willing to switch to organic planting. Fresh, organic blueberries grown by Liang Organic Blueberry and other Nanjing-based producers can now be found on the shelves of supermarkets such as Hema, Costco and Sam’s Club.
But growing blueberries in Nanjing is hardly a new idea. Our City was in fact one of the earliest areas in China to develop blueberry cultivation.
Since the mid-1980s, blueberries have been cultivated in Baima Town of Nanjing’s Lishui District. At present, apart from Jiangbei New District and Qixia District, all districts in Nanjing have blueberry planting business. The total planting area is has attained a scale of over 1,000 hectares, of which more than 900 hectares are to be found in Baima Town. Now it’s in overdrive, as the numbers show.
Looking to Shitouzhai Village in Baima, its income of ¥370,000 in 2015 has seen a six-fold increase in 7 years, reaching ¥2,113,400 in 2022.
That’s made an enormous difference in the standard of living for villagers; their 2015 per-capita income of ¥18,750 became ¥34,698 in 2022.
Realising this, to a large degree, is technology. While Nanjing has an advantage for growing blueberries due to its latitude being similar to that of California and Texas, the quality of soil has always been a hurdle.
Lu Lianfei, with the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangsu Province, said, “Nanjing’s soil is sticky and alkaline, with insufficient organic matter, less than 5 percent, to grow blueberries”.
Lu emphasised the need to rely on technology, improve the soil and introduce suitable equipment in order to create an environment suitable for blueberry growth.
Such bio-agriculture efforts have paid off, tougher with our City’s 40 year history in the blueberry business; Nanjing Baima National Agricultural Science & Technology Innovation Park was placed fourth in 2015 in the country’s national rankings.
