At the end of September, the Guanzhong Plain of Qin Province.

Qin Province is the largest apple producing region in China, accounting for a quarter of the country's production, and one out of every seven apples in the world is produced here.

Unlike other fruit-producing areas, there are not many large-scale plantations here, usually each family has a few acres of orchards, harvests hundreds to thousands of pounds of apples, and grows some wheat to live.

As in the rural areas of other provinces, the older peasants are the main cultivators, they have few sales channels, and selling the fruit to traders is the most direct and common form of sales.

But a young man named Chen Qi has a lot of ideas, when the apple market was good, he borrowed a piece of land from his wallet to build an apple plantation, hoping to grow hope in the orchard.

However, the reality is harsher than ideal.

Not to mention that the orchard has suffered natural disasters - for these weak people who rely on the sky for food, God is not a blue sky, but more like a mischievous boy.

A few years later, he became a family and solved the problem of food and clothing, but poverty still hung in front of him, and he saw no hope - although he could harvest the best quality apples, he could not resist the impact of the decline in the purchase market price, and the annual profit was less than 9,000 yuan. Poverty is like a rope that still wraps around his neck.

The main thing is that there are no sales channels. When the market is bad, there is no need to say much, and when the market is good, the buyer will lower the price. It doesn't matter if the other growers don't have many apples to sell, but he has a hard time.

It is the middlemen who enjoy the greatest benefits.

He had never done logistics, only heard that the most expensive part was in the last mile.

But he feels that for agricultural products, there is not only the last mile, but also the first kilometer from the field to transportation, which is also the "first kilometer" that restricts agricultural producers like him.

Take Apple as an example, there are many circulation channels, and there are multiple levels of continuous price rise in the middle, which brings quite high circulation costs.

Once the price at the sales end cannot rise, all links will push down the price of the production link, which will eventually lead to a decline in the purchase price of apples, and professional fruit farmers like him will not be able to make ends meet, and even become poor as a result.

If it weren't for the "market" brought by Jiagu International Trade, he would have to continue to endure the joys and sorrows brought about by market fluctuations, and struggle to breathe under the urgency that wraps around his neck.

Last year, Jiagu International Trade entered Qin Province and worked with local agents to find fruit sources, and Chen Qi's orchard finally came to work.

Apples are ordered as soon as they are on the tree, priced at the entire orchard, and during harvest season, they collect apples of all sizes and conditionalities, and even hire people to pick and pack them themselves.

For retail investors, Jiagu Trading also acquired at a price 5 cents per catty higher than the market.

Although many fruit buyers who plan to hoard apples and wait for the opportunity to sell at a high price grit their teeth with hatred, for fruit farmers like Chen Qi, they all run to tell each other and smile.

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Jiagu Trading's cold storage in Qin Province can store more than 30 million catties of apples at most, which is one of the largest in the local cold storage.

Even the apples harvested last year are still juicy and sweet in a sub-zero environment. Of course, there is basically no fruit that needs to be stored for so long.

It's apple buying season, and at its busiest, more than 200 people are sorting apples, packing them, and putting them into cold storage.

Deng Chao is one of the vice presidents of Jiagu International Commerce, responsible for the company's fresh food procurement, transportation and distribution business.

He looked at the red apples that were constantly being sent into the cold storage, and he was overjoyed.

Unlike seasonal fruits, apples are a veritable commodity, and they also have a more complex and multi-directional circulation and a longer sales cycle.

However, apples also suffer from the same common problems as other fruits and even agricultural products - the distribution of benefits in the upstream, middle and downstream is seriously uneven, and the farmers in the most upstream suffer from "production pains".

Farmers and producers, who play the most critical role, are in an extremely weak position in terms of benefit distribution, accounting for less than 10% of the entire industrial chain. What is even more frightening is that this long-standing problem of deformed interest distribution is insoluble for a large number of farmers like Chen Qi, who make a living by growing apples.

However, this unsolvable situation has been solved with the development and active involvement of Jiagu International Commerce.

The biggest feature of agricultural products that distinguish them from industrial products is their freshness, and the preservation and storage are not only technically difficult, but also the cost remains high, and the final storage link loss is not a small number.

As for the worst situation, the market is not good, and as far as industrial products are concerned, the market is not good, and it is a big deal to deal with them at a reduced price; but once there is a surplus of agricultural products, they can only watch them rot in the warehouse and in the ground, because of long-distance transportation, freight costs are more expensive than agricultural products.

However, for Jiagu Commerce, there is a cold chain logistics network that has begun to take shape for the former, and Yonghui Fresh Supermarket and Community Fresh Supermarket have strategic investment from the group for the latter.

At present, Jiagu Trading has set up more than 10 large-scale cold storage centers in China, with a cold storage capacity of 700,000 tons. Among the domestic cold chain logistics enterprises, it occupies the first place with an absolute advantage.

After Yonghui Fresh Supermarket received the strategic investment of Jiagu Group, relying on the supply and logistics chain layout of Jiagu Commerce, it has achieved great strides in development, not only out of Min Province early, and even stationed in the capital, and the number of stores in the country has exceeded 100. The number of fresh supermarkets in the community has also reached 60.

Therefore, since last year, Jiagu Commerce has started a plan to directly connect the "last mile" of the consumer end and the "first kilometer" of the origin to streamline the supply chain.

This year, Jiagu Commerce and Trade continued to further promote the contract agriculture model to eliminate the uncertainty of the planting and production end of agricultural products, and help farmers with small-scale and discrete planting and production to connect with the big market more smoothly.

At present, the middlemen have been cut, farmers have benefited, Jiagu Commerce and Trade have benefited, supermarkets have benefited, and even consumers have benefited - Yonghui Supermarket's fresh products have benefited from large-scale procurement and cold chain storage and transportation, and the price can even be lower than that of the vegetable market.

The gross profit margin of Jiagu Commerce's low-temperature warehousing, transportation and distribution business is as high as 60% - the domestic cold chain logistics industry started late, and in recent years, food safety problems have made the demand for cold storage continue to expand, and the supply exceeds demand, resulting in strong bargaining power of Jiagu Commerce;

The power of having a complete cold chain logistics network is beginning to show.

But as long as he recalls Jiagu Commerce's investment in the construction of cold chain logistics, Deng Chao feels a toothache - that is, backed by Jiagu Group, with a lot of money, he can settle down and prepare for ten years without making money, and put a long line to hang big fish, and Jiagu Trade's cold chain logistics has today's scale.

Don't think about it, even with this scale, Jiagu Trading is still losing money - the investment is too great.

And because of too much investment in cold chain logistics, it has lagged behind in conventional logistics and warehousing - such as grain, conventional logistics is enough.

However, if you continue to build your own conventional logistics warehousing, it is too time-consuming and laborious, and it is better to acquire similar enterprises in the integration market - unlike cold chain logistics, the development of conventional logistics and warehousing in China is still very fast.

As soon as he thought about it, he received a call from Zhong Huazhi, the boss above: "Old Deng, come back quickly and discuss how to eat big dogs." With the subprime mortgage crisis in full swing and the group making a fortune in the US, we have an opportunity to make up for it by buying cheap assets in the midst of the crisis!"

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