Lijiang turns barren mountains into orchards

In early spring, lush greenery covers Mt. Taliu in Yongsheng county of Lijiang city.

Zhang Guanghua, the head of Yongsheng Maoge Agricultural Development Co., Ltd., is inspecting the growth of olive trees in the plantation. In 2015, he decided to work in the desolate Mt. Taliu. That year, Zhang attempted to plant 1,500 mu (about 100 hectare) of olive trees here, and now he has encouraged more than 300 households in the surrounding area to plant 3,500 mu (about 233.33 hectare) of olive trees.

"My company achieved an output value of over 2 million yuan in 2022, and it exceeded 3 million yuan in 2023. The output value will increase year by year and we will also build an olive oil processing plant to realize a one-stop operation,” said Zhang.

In 2022, Lijiang Shiban Bioengineering Co., Ltd. invested over 2 million yuan to introduce an olive oil cold-pressing production line from Turkey. Gao Yan, the manager of the company, explained that the company established the factory here because of the promising prospects of the industry.

As of now, Lijiang city has developed 80,000 mu (about 53.33 km2) of olive planting area and built four processing production lines. In 2022, the city produced 1,320 tons of fresh olives and 200 tons of fine olive oil.

Source: Yunnan Daily; photo by Lijiang Updates and Read Lijiang; trans-editing by Wang Yunya