Li Dingshun: Little Bee Big Industry

Li Dingshun is the director-general of Beijing Aojinda Bee Products Cooperative which is located in Gaoling Town on the north bank of Beijing Miyun Reservoir–the beautiful pearl of Yanshan Mountain. Founded in April 2004, the Cooperative is one of the earliest farmers’ specialized cooperatives in Miyun District. At present, the Cooperative has 920 members, covering 3 districts in Beijing, and has radiated Fengning, Luanping, and Chengde counties in Chengde City, Hebei Province, promoting the integration of the beekeeping industry between Beijing and Hebei Province. The Cooperative has more than 140 standardized breeding bases, 83 demonstration bee farms for ecological origin protection, 16 bases for green bee products, and 2 demonstration bee farms for pollination and breeding, with an annual output of more than 2,000 tons of honey and an output value of nearly 50 million yuan. With the support of the MTCP2 Program, Li Dingshun, together with members of AMI (Administration and Management Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), went to Thailand on 28 May to 1 June 2018 to participate in the Sub-regional Executive Committee Meeting on the MTCP2 (IFAD’s Medium Term Cooperation Programme with Farmers’ Organisations in Asia and the Pacific, Phase II) and to showcase the “Huatong (Chinese name “花彤”)” honey produced by the Cooperative, thus laying a foundation for the products to go abroad.

Focusing on innovation and standardized production. Innovation is the vitality of the Cooperative. Since its establishment, the Cooperative has attached great importance to scientific and technological innovation and formed its own R&D team. The Cooperative has a GMP standard workshop of 3,500 meters. As the NIA of the MTCP2 Program in China, the AMI has conducted in-depth research on the Cooperative many times, providing help and paving the way for it. At present, the Cooperative has introduced 2 modern full-automatic honey production lines, established the first advanced mature honey production system in China, and obtained 12 intellectual property rights such as “Honey Breaker” and “Honey Colony Automatic Coding Management Software”. The Cooperative has developed and established a leading domestic management platform for the smart bee industry, a new management model of the bee industry, “Internet of Things + Internet + Bee Farm Real-time Monitoring + Environmental and Meteorological Data Monitoring and Analysis + Information-based Bee Adoption + Dynamic Monitoring of Industrial Chain”, was molded. It realizes the dynamic and transparent monitoring and tracing of the whole process from basic information management of bee colony, shaking honey production, bee farm base environment, bee adoption, raw material acquisition and testing, warehousing and processing, and terminal product sales.

Striving for brand building and high quality. In 2007, the Cooperative established its own honey brand-“Huatong”, “Huatong” brand not only entered more than 90 domestic large supermarket chains such as Wumei, Guotai, Xidan but also successively opened flagship stores on famous online platforms such as JD.com and Suning. Up to then, the cooperatives have fully established its national sales and marking network through co-existence online and offline. The Cooperative is one of the special suppliers of raw honey for the 29th Beijing Olympics in 2008 and is also the first batch of mature honey production demonstration areas of the Chinese Apiculture Society. As one of the Director-general of cooperatives established earlier in Beijing, Li Dingshun has been participating in various trainings organized by AMI since 2012, especially after learning the importance of the brand building. Through standardized production and other means, he has actively strengthened brand building and achieved remarkable results. In 2016, the Cooperative’s “Huatong” brand bee product was awarded a “Well-known Trademark in China”, and Jinghua (Chinese name: 荆花) honey was rated as “Ecological Origin Protection Product of China” by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) (the first food protection product in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei region to obtain the certification).

Return benefits to the people and let members share the fruits of development. Adhering to the principle of cooperation and sharing, the Cooperative is committed to turning the small bee into a big industry, leading its members to increase their incomes and become rich and share the fruits of development. The first is to increase the channels of member income. The Cooperative buy members’ raw honey at a price 15% higher than that of non-members and buy low-income households’ raw honey at a price 20% higher than ordinary members. At the same time, the Cooperative is responsible for contacting farmers of facility agriculture, arranging members to pollinate facility crops on an annual basis, and increasing members’ income. Every year, the Cooperative distributes 1.5 million yuan as a dividend for members. Part-time beekeepers in the Cooperative can earn 30,000 yuan for a year while the full-time beekeepers’ yearly income reaches to 100,000 yuan. Some large professional beekeepers can earn over 200,000 yuan by the end of the year. The second is to increase employment. The Cooperative has helped more than 1,500 local beekeepers to start their own businesses, arranged 11 jobs for the disabled, solved 53 local jobs, and provided 72 temporary jobs. Since 2015, the Cooperative has solved the problem of transferring employment and increasing the income of more than 200 farmers who have turned their farmland to forbidden farming in Miyun Reservoir First-class Protected Area, enabling some grazing farmers to successfully transform into beekeepers. Starting in 2016, the Cooperative has helped 148 low-income households in the region to become rich by beekeeping.