Jan / Mar 2020No. 149

31st March 2020

Walnut Marketing in Community

Pigsty disinfection

Visited Hanyuan for Sichuan Pepper Management Skill Training

Project Progress

Marketing Project of Pianma Township, Hanyuan County

Walnut Selling

In early January, with the assistance of DORS, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory successfully ordered 290 packages of walnut from Jianping Cooperative. All walnut were provided by Jianping Cooperative. The Shanghai Astronomical Observatory has been keeping close contact with and given support to the villagers of remote mountainous areas of Sichuan for a long time. They wanted to support the local villagers through purchasing the local products. However, as most of products were made by villagers themselves such as the honey, walnut oil and dried sweet potato, there is no food production license. Therefore, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory could not buy their products in an official way. This is the village development constraint, and needs to be solved in the future if we want to receive more orders to sell village products.

Pianma Township Youth Entrepreneurship Project

In order to encourage qualified local young people stay at their hometown to promote the local development, DORS initiated the Entrepreneurship project for young people in the Pianma Township. This project provided funds for young people to start their own business.

In early January 2020, DORS project staff went to all project villages to inspect the project progress of the first 10 participants. Each household has their own story regarding their application for this fund to develop their business dream. One household’s pigs suffered from African swine fever virus, all pigs were dead and therefore he changed to raising chicken; one raises black pigs the ecological way with the fund; one used the fund to buy pigfood as his new born daughter was sick and he had to spend money in the hospital; one used the fund to upgrade his pigsty; one to expand his goat pens from 2 goats to 18 goats; one used the fund to buy the MOyu seeds; one tried to improve his agricultural management skills, and so on…

We were happy to see all these efforts and changes happening in the villages, which will be the future vision of Chinese villagers. Although the COVID virus is still spreading in the world, (which also affected the DORS projects), we are sure it will be end soon.

Machang Village and Siguojue Village Income-generating Project

The project is aimed to fund women to generate income through small scale cultivating, breeding or business. Meanwhile, assistance is provided in the form of training on relevant techniques, health and hygiene knowledge and money management.

Animal Husbandry Management Skills Training - Pigsty cleaning and disinfection

In January 2020, DORS invited Director Lama of Agricultural & Animal Husbandry Bureau of Xide County to Hamlet 3 of Machang Village to give a training session on pigsty cleaning and disinfection and he showed the villagers how to conduct the disinfection in a villager’s pigsty. He was accompanied by Mr. Jialuo to interpret the training into Yi dialogue for the Yi villagers. In order to have a clean pigsty, all the corners need to be taken care of in order to avoid any signs African swine fever virus. All villagers listened very carefully and followed what he said. After the training session, the Agricultural & Animal Husbandry Bureau of Xide County gave each household the 84-disinfectant for them to clean their pigsty.

Sichuan Pepper management skill training for winter

After visiting Hanyuan projects, we went to other villages to carry out Sichuan Pepper management skill training for winter season. The training covered how to mix the lime with sulphur, Sichuan pepper pruning, and smearing the mixture of lime & sulphur on the pepper tree.

At the training, villagers were surprised with the changing color of the mixture of lime & sulfur from white to yellow and then to brown. It was also the first time that villagers learned how to prune the Sichuan pepper tree. Most of households, including some young men, attended the training. Hopefully there will be a good harvest after their efforts this year

DORS projects and works were affected due to the COVID outbreak from January-March of this year.

Visited Qingxi Town of Hanyuan County to learn Sichuan Pepper management and processing technology

In Jauary 2020, DORS organized villagers of Machang and Siguojue villages to Qingxi Town to learn the Sichuan Pepper management and processing technology. Hopefully, all of them could improve their skill to better take care of their pepper trees and therefore to help others in their villages. During the evaluation meeting for this visit, they told DORS in Yi dialogue that:

Mr. Aniulagu: I was not familiar with Hanyuan County when I first came to this city, everything was new and lovely for me. The most impressive for me was that the crops were grown all over the mountainside and surrounded villagers’ houses in Hanyuan. Although we are all Yi people as well, this was the biggest difference to us. It was my second time to Hanyuan, I knew the purpose of this visit, and learned a lot from others, e.g. the management of Chinese pepper in order to improve the yield.

Ms. Molodar: Looking at the high buildings and prosperous businesses along the street, I admired the Hanyuan residents for their efforts to reach this status. Thanks to DORS for organising this trip and we will apply the technology learned from this training on our pepper orchard.

Ms. Jibuakamo: This was my second time coming to Hanyuan, I was so excited. I still remembered that DORS organized the first trip to Hanyuan, when we had learned a lot. So I was the first one to apply for this visit when I heard about it. I wanted to learn from others and improve my Sichuan pepper management technology.

Ms. Erguwuniu: This was my second time to Hanyuan. When I first came to Hanyuan, I was afraid of getting lost, so did not visit anywhere. Thanks to your excellent arrangements we visited a lot this time. I will share my learning and experiences with my village people.

All of them were listening carefully and asked a lot of questions regarding their daily Sichuan pepper management. All participants had learned a lot according to the evaluation, it was worth organizing this visit for villagers.