NANJING, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- In the small village of Xieqiao, most of the corn and wheat grown on the farmland does not go to dining tables, but into making bunches of "dried flowers."
Zhang Zhan, 67, was the first person in Xieqiao of Suqian City in Jiangsu Province, to make dried flowers. "They all believed I was crazy and some even took me as a liar," he said, recalling how he persuaded the village to join him in making the flowers over 10 years ago.
Zhang saw the business opportunity 20 years ago when selling fresh flowers in Beijing. "I found that almost all the dried flowers were imported and sold at a high price," he said.
He started to learn a flower technique, finding that wheat, corn bran, branches and wild grass could used to make exquisite dried flowers.
"After bleaching, dyeing and drying in the sun, the corn bran can be made into roses, lilies and lotus flowers," he said.
He went back hometown to become a farmer and run his own dried flower workshop. In 2007, Zhang opened two online stores on the newly-popularized e-commerce platform Taobao.com.
In 2012, his stores had an annual sales of over 6 million yuan (952,000 U.S. dollars) in total. Now he owns over 20 online stores with an annual sales volume of 60 million yuan, offering more than 300 jobs to the villagers. His flowers have even been sold to Japan, the Netherlands and the United States.
More and more farmers have started to make dried flowers. A number of university students, retired soldiers and migrant workers from the village returned home to join in the business.
Currently, over 90 percent of the 3,000 villagers are making and selling dried flowers. They run more than 630 online stores boasting annual sales of over 260 million yuan.
China's "No. 1 central document" for this year, published Sunday, focuses on agriculture, farmers and rural areas. It sets specific tasks for the country's rural vitalization strategy, including higher-quality agricultural development and ensuring the quality of poverty-reduction.
In recent years, the Chinese government has pushed the integration of the Internet and agriculture, to improve farmers' lives.
Flower grower Zhang Yan in Shuyang county of Jiangsu began to sell flowers online in 2007. In 2016, he started to promote his products through live streaming.
"At the beginning there were only hundreds in the audience, but now I have over 30,000 fans and each live stream attracts around 40,000 people to watch," he said.
The live streams have helped improve his daily sales from about 3,000 yuan to 7,000 yuan in peak seasons, he said.
Some 33,333 hectares of land in the county is planted with over 3,000 kinds of flowers, and the online flower sales volume is over 9 billion yuan annually.
According to a report by the e-commerce giant Alibaba, there are 2,118 Taobao villages, referring to villages where over 10 percent of households are involved in online selling, with total annual transactions of more than 10 million yuan.
It is expected that the number of Taobao village will be over 5,500 in 2020, bringing more than 3 million jobs to the countryside.
"The Internet is empowering farmers and turning them into new kinds of farmers," Zhang Zhan said.
