151: Chapter 151 Visiting the Countryside to See Real Results

Photographer Wang Lu aimed her camera at the playground.

Under the brand-new basketball hoop, a few boys were playing ball;

on the colorful rubber track, the figures of girls jumping rope were nimble;

in the corner, several children gathered around the newly installed ping-pong table to watch the match.

This scene was a stark contrast to the dilapidated rural primary school in Photographer Wang Lu's memory.

Reporter Zhang Chen stopped a female teacher walking by with lesson plans tucked under her arm.

The young teacher pushed up her glasses, her face unable to hide a smile: "Now we don't have to worry about the roof leaking during class anymore."

She pointed to the children listening attentively in the classroom: "Look, even the children's focus has improved."

In Class 2, Grade 4, Reporter Zhang Chen crouched down and asked a little girl: "Do you like the new school?"

The girl with pigtails nodded vigorously: "The old classroom used to leak, but now it doesn't, and we can even use the laboratory to do experiments!"

She proudly displayed the plant specimen she made in science class, her eyes sparkling.

As they left, the campus broadcast was playing the music for eye exercises.

Township Head Mao Yungang stood at the school gate, looking at the teaching building bathed in sunlight, and said softly: "No matter how poor we are, we cannot neglect education; these children are the future of Guantian Township."

Reporter Zhang Chen recorded this sentence word for word in his interview notebook.

...

Leaving Qingshan Primary School, the car drove along the newly built farm road for about twenty minutes, and the view suddenly opened up, revealing a silver-white "ocean" shimmering in the sunlight.

"Comrade reporters, this is our township's Vegetable Base."

Township Head Mao Yungang jumped out of the car first, pointing to the sprawling vegetable greenhouses before them, his tone filled with unconcealable pride.

Hundreds of standardized greenhouses were arranged neatly, looking like silver waves under the sunlight, a truly spectacular sight.

As soon as they entered the Vegetable Base, a wave of air mixed with the fragrance of soil and fresh vegetables rushed over them.

Township Head Mao Yungang, familiar with the path, lifted the plastic curtain of a greenhouse, revealing a whole new world inside.

Emerald green cucumber vines climbed the trellises, and workers were nimbly picking fresh cucumbers, the "snap" sounds of boxing them never ceasing.

"We use the latest drip irrigation technology, combined with a scientific ratio of organic fertilizer."

Township Head Mao Yungang bent down to push aside a vegetable leaf, revealing the black drip irrigation tube buried in the soil.

"The cucumbers grown this way have a sweetness level of over 4.5 and are hot items in the provincial capital's supermarkets."

Photographer Wang Lu curiously took a cucumber handed to her by a worker and snapped it gently; with a crisp cracking sound, crystal-clear juice immediately seeped out.

She took a bite and widened her eyes in surprise: "It's really sweet!"

In the packaging workshop, Reporter Zhang Chen saw workers performing pre-cooling treatments on the freshly picked vegetables.

Township Head Mao Yungang explained: "This maximizes freshness, allowing them to appear in vegetable markets over a hundred kilometers away by the next morning."

He opened the ledger, which was densely packed with records of daily shipment volumes and sales regions.

"Currently, the Vegetable Base has brought six surrounding villages and over four hundred farming households into the cultivation process."

Township Head Mao Yungang pointed to the map on the wall: "We implement the 'Three Unifications' model: unified varieties, unified technology, and unified sales. We expect an average household income increase of over five thousand yuan this year."

As they left, Reporter Zhang Chen looked back at the still-busy Vegetable Base; the figures of the workers and rows of vegetable transport trucks formed a vivid picture of modern agriculture.

He suddenly understood that this Vegetable Base carried not just the joy of a harvest, but also the vivid practice of a township lifting itself out of poverty.

...

The motorcade bumped along the dusty country road for about twenty minutes before finally arriving at an open area.

Reporter Zhang Chen looked through the car window; rows of red-brick pigsties were arranged neatly, their roofs covered with grey tiles, making them quite striking in the afternoon sun.

"This is our township's collective livestock farm."

Township Head Mao Yungang got out of the car and patted the dust off his trouser legs.

The air held a faint scent of fermented feed, mixed with the fragrance of soil.

Several animal keepers wearing blue work clothes were pushing wheelbarrows to transport feed. Seeing the township head arrive, they all stopped their work to greet him.

Township Head Mao Yungang, familiar with the path, led the two reporters into a pigsty.

Inside, wooden boards partitioned the space into pig pens, where dozens of fat pigs were snorting and eating feed from the trough.

A blackboard hung on the wall, densely written with chalk numbers, recording the feeding amount and weight gain for each pen of pigs.

"We use scientifically formulated feed."

Township Head Mao Yungang bent down and grabbed a handful of feed, spreading it on his palm: "Corn, soybean meal, and wheat bran are mixed in proportion, which increases weight gain by thirty percent compared to single-feed feeding."

In the cattle shed area, dozens of yellow cattle were tied to wooden posts, leisurely chewing their cud.

Township Head Mao Yungang patted a sturdy breeding bull and said proudly: "This breeding bull is an excellent variety introduced from the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences; the calves born after breeding can have a meat yield increase of twenty percent."

"Currently, the total livestock inventory in the entire township has exceeded one hundred thousand head."

Township Head Mao Yungang opened a thick ledger, which recorded the farming data for each village and household in neat fountain-pen writing.

This number made Reporter Zhang Chen's pen pause; after all, this was just the farming scale of a single township.

Photographer Wang Lu's camera shutter clicked continuously.

The back of the animal keeper bending over to clean the cattle trough, the focused expression of the old veterinarian checking the cattle's pulse, the joyful scene of children herding the sheep back home...