Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative is located in Chiyu County, Shizijie Town, Donggang City, Liaoning Province – “the first strawberry county in China”. As a farmer’s mutual aid organization, the goal of Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative is to serve all members, and the interests of the members are paramount. Founded in 2008, the Cooperative has a registered capital of 5.6 million yuan and 266 members. The Cooperative provides members with services in seed selection, breeding, planting, primary processing, and marketing. In recent years, the Cooperative has gradually established its own fruit packaging factory, seedling breeding center, fruit supply chain control center, pesticide testing center, fruit graded refrigerated logistics center, Internet of Things electronic operation center, logistics distribution center, etc., which has radiated 2,800 farmers in 10 nearby towns to plant strawberries in Dandong. In 2018, the Cooperative planted 667 hectares of strawberries, with sales of fresh strawberries reaching 100 million yuan and the average income of its members reaching 100,000 yuan. The success story of Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative and its Director-general Ma Tingdong stems from the dream of building a leading strawberry brand in China，benefited from the support of the MTCP2 China project. As the joint implementation of the MTCP2 Program in China, the director of the cooperative, MA Tingdong became a participant of the “Gather Strength to Strengthen the Cooperative” since 2016, which helps the cooperatives to achieve rapid improvement in management level and operation capacity.
To start a cooperative from scratch. Ma Tingdong, Director-general of Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative, decided to return to his hometown to start his own business after working hard in Beijing for eight years and aimed at strawberry cultivation, a characteristic industry in his hometown. He invested with his friends, rented land, and planted strawberries. After three or four years of groping and countless failures and setbacks, he found that cooperation and alliance is the right path for his career. In 2008, he established Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative with five farmers. In the same year, he has attended the training course for the director-generals of the farmers’ cooperative organized by AMI, thus gradually stepping into the broad road of the standardized development of the Cooperative.
Being strict in quality control. With the steady development of the Cooperative, it has gradually become the main supplier of fresh strawberries in local supermarkets. The Cooperative put more and more energy and inputs on product quality control. The Cooperative cooperates with scientific research institutions such as the local academy of agricultural sciences in seed selection and seedling culturing, integrates standardized strawberry planting techniques, and vigorously popularizes and applies them to its members to ensure that the quality and taste of fresh strawberries produced by the Cooperative are uniform and controllable. In a training session organized by AMI, Director-general Ma Tingdong learned about the Internet of Things technology and quality traceability system. After the training, the cooperative put the new technology into use and printed a two-dimensional tracing code on the product packaging to facilitate consumers to trace the source and purchase at ease.
Tapping into online sales. Through the application of advanced technology and production management, the fresh strawberry supply of Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative can now run from November to July of the following year, which is much longer than the supply period of conventional strawberry producers. The Cooperative has also become the largest supplier in the local strawberry market. In a training course, Director-general Ma Tingdong learned about the development trend of agricultural e-commerce and some major agricultural e-commerce channel resources. The Cooperative believes that the development of e-commerce is an opportunity for the Cooperative to upgrade its marketing. From then on, the Cooperative has gradually begun to explore the way of e-commerce marketing. Finally, during the Spring Festival in 2019, the Cooperative’s strawberries became a hit on Taobao, selling 25,000 boxes of strawberries (1.5 kg) in just four days, making it a Spring Festival hit.
It takes ten years to sharpen a sword. Shengye Berry Farmer Cooperative has grown from a negligible one at the beginning of its establishment to an important supplier in the strawberry market in China, which is inseparable from the hard exploration of the cooperative management team and also benefited from the guidance and inspiration of training, research, and consultation activities under the framework of MTCP2 for the development of the Cooperative. Today, under the drive of the Cooperative, more than 30,000 households in more than 10 surrounding townships are engaged in the cultivation of small berries, which has increased their income and made them rich. Small berries have truly become the fruit of Dandong farmers’ wealth.
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