N China's mountainous county benefits from growing exotic crops

Jingle, a mountainous county located in the hinterlands of the Loess Plateau started growing quinoa -- an imported plant native to the Andes Mountains of South America -- in 2010 because of efforts made by Wu Xiangyun, now chairman of the board of Jiaqi Quinoa who discovered this grain in a supermarket in Australia in 2007 when he was still an overseas company staff.

Quinoa is a nutritious grain crop high in protein, fiber and various beneficial antioxidants. It is one of the few plant foods that contain sufficient amounts of all nine essential amino acids. The crop was considered by NASA to be able to meet needs of humans on long-term space missions. Wu introduced it to China and succeeded in growing it in Jingle, which, as the head of the local agriculture and rural affairs bureau Hao Lijun put it, has "thousands of hectares of farm land with balmy weather and sufficient rainfall."

The local government and department of agriculture and rural affairs worked with Wu's team to construct an agricultural layout and set a strategic plan to grow this "new" crop on the best of their farmlands that had been otherwise reserved for potatoes, a household staple food of Jingle.

Since 2012, after a year of exploration and trials, Jingle gained full momentum in commercial farming of quinoa. In the next year, the county was awarded the honorary title of “China's Hometown of Quinoa”. The county’s farmers had a bumper harvest of quinoa and saw a marked increase in their incomes that year.

"We have never earned so much money in all our lives," one old farmer told Wu after the harvest.

Jingle county was delisted from the country's poverty-stricken counties in 2020. With constant agricultural technology research and development, it has now become a pivotal base of quinoa farming and breeding, and home to a complete chain of quinoa production under a cooperative framework between the Jingle government and Jiaqi Quinoa.

The Humanities School of the Communication University of China conducted field research in Jingle in the summer of 2021. The research group visited a test area for a new quinoa breed and the industrial park of “China's Hometown of Quinoa”, which was under construction.