Rural economy in Guizhou gets push from chive plants

As a mountainous province, Guizhou is making full use of its few flat areas of land, or baqu, to develop economic crops while decreasing traditional crops like corn in an effort to adjust the local agricultural structure to make rural villagers wealthier as soon as possible.

Wang Houde, a farmer in Puding county, used to earn only 3,000 yuan ($423) per year from planting corn on his 2,000 square meters of land.

However, he now earns 10 times as much annually after joining neighbors several years ago to use his land for planting jiuhuang, or Chinese chives, a popular vegetable.