NANJING, July 25 (Xinhua) -- For almost four decades, Yu Huanqin, a peach farmer in Yangshan Township, east China's Jiangsu Province, has kept records of peach prices in every harvest season.
Yu, 63, has seen the surge of peach prices from a few cents per kilo in the late 1980s to over 50 yuan (about 7.4 U.S. dollars) per kilo now.
After the harvest, she plans to embark on her annual trip around China. "I have visited almost all the famous tourist spots in China, with the money earned from my peach business," she said.
Yu was a television antenna saleswoman before she returned home in 1984 to plant peaches in her family's orchard. The decision was made as Yangshan switched its focus from grain to peach cultivation after China's economic reform 40 years ago.
Yu's business took off quickly and has seen steady growth over the decades. "I made less than 5,000 yuan in 2000, but last year I earned over 100,000 yuan," she said.
Yu's success is indicative of Yangshan's booming peach industry.
Yangshan has around 2,133 hectares of peach trees, yielding 50,000 tonnes of peaches per year, worth over 500 million yuan. The town known across China as home to remarkably sweet and succulent honey peaches, dubbed "the best peach on earth" by the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
Like Yu, Luo Shengkang returned to Yangshan to join the peach boom, setting up a peach production cooperative in 2010 after graduating from a university in Nanjing, the provincial capital.
"Shanghai (about 165 kilometers away from Yangshan) has a big market," Luo said. "And I saw great potential in scale production of honey peaches in Yangshan."
In 2008, local authorities pledged to facilitate land transfer in Yangshan to promote large-scale peach production in the form of farmer cooperatives, family farms and joint partnerships. Yangshan currently has 200 peach production cooperatives and over 30 family peach farms.
Luo's cooperative, Youyou Orchard Cooperative, has a peach farm that occupies about 6.7 hectares, with a revenue of nearly five million yuan last year.
The cooperative mainly sells peaches through e-commerce platforms, such as popular Taobao and WeChat stores. The peaches are packed in fancy gift boxes, instead of being sold by the kilo or in baskets as in the past.
Farmers like Yu Huanqin are also selling their peaches online. Though Yu still retains the habit of keeping her accounts by hand, she no longer needs to carry her peaches for sale as her daughter helps her sell them online.
"When I was a kid, peach farmers in Yangshan carried their peaches to the pier, and the peaches were later shipped to nearby Suzhou and Shanghai. In the 1980s, I put peaches in baskets and carried them on my bicycle to sell," she said.
Now she only needs to wait at home for staff from courier companies to collect her peaches and transport them to customers across the country.
"It's like living in a dream," she said.
