When the picking season arrived, the 51-year-old Gan Zhenhua tidied his hat, slung a bamboo basket over his shoulder, and plunged into the greenhouse with over twenty workers, busily harvesting the valuable pepper.
As a resident in Zhangshu Township, Xiangyin County, central China's Hunan Province, Gan also works as the head of the Hunan Zhongyuan ecological agriculture technology development Co., Ltd., committed to pioneering the development of the local pepper industry with advanced technologies and ideas.
"The sales of pepper this year are promising. We aim to double our income with more efforts," said Gan, who calculated that the joint pepper planting area of the company and the local cooperative now reaches 560 mu (about 37.3 hectares), with an estimated annual output value of around 30 million yuan (about 4.15 million U.S. dollars).
Registered as one of the Agro-product Geographical Indications, "Zhangshugang pepper" that has been cultivated for centuries is the reason why Gan shifted from an urban white-collar worker to a new farmer four years ago.
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