Leading Farmers

On 29 August 2008, leading farmers, leading farmer trainers and project officers attended the leading farmer evaluating symposium to report progress of leading farmer activities and discuss their planning. During the symposium, leading farmer trainer, Wang Dianyong, reported the progress of leading farmers in the first half of the year.

Leading farmers, Wang Fuhui from Suning and Feng Shuangli from Gaocheng, shared their experiences as leading farmers and defined their plans for the near future. County project officers also expressed their ideas on how to organize leading farmer activities in the pilot counties.

Technical Packages Workshop

From 28 August to 29 August 2008, experts, project officers and local farmers were invited to attend the project technical package seminar in order to further upgrade project technical packages.

The project technical package seminar mainly dealt with cucumber, tomato, green pepper and eggplant technical packages. Participants discussed the problems when implementing the project technical packages and corresponding suggestions were brought forward during the seminar as well.

Cooperative Training Program

From 29 August to 30 August 2008, a farmer cooperative training program was held in Shijiazhuang to give a systematical training to cooperatives in terms of marketing, quality assurance system and internal management.

Several organizations were involved in this workshop and gave presentations. The organizations included the provincial Environmental Protection Station, the Economics and Institution Management Division, the Green Certification Office, Global-gap, Starfarm, Tian'an Vegetable Company and several cooperatives in Hebei province.

The workshop covered three major topics, namely overview of farmer cooperative development (Management and development of cooperative), domestic and international group quality certification systems (The global partnership for Good Agricultural Practice, Green Certification system in China) and how to gain access to supermarkets (Requirement of industrialization: development of cooperative).

It shows a great success of the cooperative training program. The cooperative representatives raised a lot of questions during the program. The experts delivering the training also went to the selected cooperatives afterwards in order to discuss the cooperative in the near future.