Matsutake mushrooms are known as the "king of mushrooms" in Japan, and you can guess that the price is quite high just by hearing the name. For example, the first batch of matsutake mushrooms this year began to be sold on the counters of Japanese supermarkets at the end of June. A small box of 120 grams of washed slices retails for up to 6,500 yen.

Even when matsutake mushrooms are on the market, the retail price per kilogram is maintained at more than 10,000 yen. But the same thing in southern Yunnan Province in China is not sold at all, and it is not even as popular as ordinary shiitake mushrooms!

In fact, as early as 1985, when Japanese tourists were traveling in the suburbs of southern Yunnan, they accidentally found matsutake mushrooms abandoned by mountain people in the farmers' market, thus opening the history of domestic matsutake exports to Japan.

But five years later, the annual export volume of matsutake mushrooms is growing, but generally not high. One of the most important reasons for this is that logistics cannot keep up. Although matsutake mushrooms are delicious, they will completely spoil and lose their original flavor in just three or four days at room temperature.

The main production area of matsutake mushroom in southern Yunnan Province is mainly located in the northwest near the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which is a backward and remote area with poor natural conditions and inconvenient transportation. At present, it takes two days to export matsutake mushrooms, from being purchased from mountain people and then transported to Kunzhou, the capital of southern Yunnan Province.

Queensland has not yet opened a direct flight to Japan, so it needs to fly to Beijing or Hong Kong to connect to Japan, so it needs to be delayed for another day. In this way, the freshness of matsutake mushrooms is already very poor after three days, and it is impossible to sell them at a high price.

For example, the average FOB price of matsutake mushrooms exported from South Korea to Japan the year before last was about US$20,000 per ton, while the average export price of southern Yunnan Province was only US$5,000. If you want to increase the price, you must ensure the quality of matsutake mushrooms. In fact, the southern Yunnan matsutake mushroom is located in the plateau area above 3,500 meters above sea level, and the quality is better than that of the Korean matsutake mushroom, mainly because the logistics are too slow on the way, so that the matsutake mushroom is no longer fresh when it arrives in Japan.

In order to extend the shelf life of matsutake mushrooms, it is necessary to implement a full cold chain throughout the logistics process of matsutake mushrooms. By controlling temperature, humidity and other conditions, the aerobic consumption of matsutake mushrooms is reduced.

However, at present, the domestic companies engaged in the export business of matsutake mushrooms are basically scattered, and most of them do not even have export qualifications, and they need to be affiliated with state-owned import and export companies, and it is impossible to build a full transportation cold chain. It is necessary to purchase special refrigerated vehicles, refrigerated boxes, and build special refrigerated warehouses, not to mention opening up foreign trade, customs, airlines and other departments, which cannot be achieved by companies without strong strength.

Therefore, the current export of matsutake mushrooms is still a high-input, high-output industry, the original large-scale export of domestic matsutake mushrooms, but also after 2000, when the basic transportation facilities have been greatly improved, the level of logistics and express delivery has also been greatly improved. But now Li Ying inadvertently discovered this project, so that the matsutake industry in the entire southern Yunnan Province has suddenly entered the fast lane of development.

As early as the year before last, Oceanpower Fund signed a cooperation agreement with the South Yunnan Provincial Government to jointly establish the Yunnan South River Modern Agricultural Development Fund, with the first batch of 200 million Hong Kong dollars injected into the establishment of a matsutake industry export demonstration zone for South Yunnan Province. Last year, taking advantage of the abnormal temperature in Northeast Japan and the decline in local matsutake production, Yunnan Province successfully exported 400 tons of matsutake to Japan, with an average selling price of 25,000 US dollars per ton, earning a total of 10 million US dollars.

In the matsutake mushroom harvest season that has just ended this year, the export of matsutake mushrooms from southern Yunnan province has increased to 1,200 tons, earning a total of more than 25 million US dollars.

With the successful opening of the Japanese market for southern Yunnan matsutake mushrooms, Xichuan Province, which also has many matsutake resources next door, is naturally envious and wants to seek cooperation with the Oceanpower Foundation. Li Ying went north to Beijing this time, on behalf of the Haichuan Foundation, has negotiated with the leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation and other central ministries and commissions, and finally decided that the Oceanpower Foundation and the National Poverty Relief Foundation will inject 400 million Hong Kong dollars and 100 million yuan respectively to establish a special fund for China's matsutake industry to guide southern Yunnan, Xichuan and Qinghai-Tibet provinces to establish a sustainable matsutake export industry, and help farmers in matsutake production areas to achieve poverty alleviation and prosperity by collecting wild edible mushroom resources such as matsutake mushrooms.

In fact, the annual harvest period of matsutake mushrooms is not long, generally from the end of June to the beginning of September, only a little more than two months.

During the remaining 10 months of the non-matsutake collection period, the cold chain of transportation and storage specially established for matsutake is idle. In order to improve the utilization rate and efficiency of the entire industrial chain, as early as last year, after the end of the matsutake mushroom harvesting period, the Oceanpower Foundation began to carry out new cooperation with the Yunnan provincial government.

Southern Yunnan is mild and spring-like, which is very suitable for flower planting. In another time and space, southern Yunnan Province, Colombia and Ecuador in South America, and Kenya in Africa are known as the world's four major flower producing regions. Flowers, like matsutake mushrooms, are goods with a very short shelf life, a full cold chain, and fast logistics!

So after the matsutake project got off to a good start, Li Ying set her sights on the flower industry! But compared to matsutake mushrooms, which only need to solve the transportation problem, the flower industry is much more complicated. On the one hand, Yunnan Province does not have experience in modern flower breeding, planting, harvesting, and logistics, and flowers do not have a large and stable market like matsutake mushrooms in Japan, which needs to be developed from scratch!

In the past 20 years, Hong Kong people's material living standards have improved rapidly, and the consumption of flowers, which was originally quite extravagant, has also begun to become an important decoration for many family interior decorations. And giving a bouquet of fiery roses to a lover has become a very popular practice for many young people when they fall in love.

On Valentine's Day last year, more than 1 million roses were sold in one day across Hong Kong. Don't look at the number of a million roses, but in fact it is only sixty or seventy tons, and it is not enough to fit the cargo compartment of a Boeing 747 full cargo aircraft.

What's more, the roses in southern Yunnan cannot occupy the entire Hong Kong market at once, so it is not cost-effective to rent a B747 aircraft from Huaxing Airlines, and it is better to use the cargo warehouse of passenger flights to transport.

Dragonair just launched a route to Kunzhou, the capital of southern Yunnan Province, for dinner in Hong Kong last year, but the flight occupancy rate is not too high, and there is just a lot of storage space to transport flowers.

This is also the reason why Li Ying is so interested in Dragonair. In order to better ensure the quality of the flowers, she is going to talk to the management of Dragonair to make some special minor upgrades to the cargo hold of the passenger plane, so as to reduce the loss rate of flowers during air transportation.

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