Qinggang county bets on modern agriculture to spur rural growth

Qinggang county in Heilongjiang province is betting on modern agriculture to inject fresh momentum into its rural economy, with a new industrial park expected to draw companies across the pork and food-processing chains and help build a multibillion-yuan industry cluster.

Vigorously developing the green food sector, Qinggang aims to build the Ufoodvalley Industrial Park, a modern and standardized food industrial park, by expanding the range of products and extending industrial chains.

The county has partnered with Techlex, a national leading enterprise in agricultural industrialization, bringing in two of the group's wholly-owned subsidiaries — Maple Leaf Pasture Food and Yuka Animal Husbandry — and developing seven projects covering fields such as pig slaughtering, breeding bases and prepared-food processing. In 2025, the projects generated output worth 1.85 billion yuan ($275 million), the local government said.

Currently, Techlex's annual pig slaughtering capacity has reached 1 million heads and its prepared-food processing capacity has reached 30,000 metric tons.

Meanwhile, Qinggang is focusing on industries including meat, corn, ramie textiles and soybeans, and promoting the development of food processing toward greener, smarter and higher-end production.

The Ufoodvalley Industrial Park boasts a planned area of 524 mu, or 34.93 hectares, and a construction budget of 450 million yuan. Using government bond funds, the county has completed all of the park's infrastructure, including its core functional areas; standardized production workshops, cold-storage facilities, a product research and development center, and supporting facilities.

Techlex's prepared-food division has established operations in Factory No 1 within the park, while all production equipment has been installed and commissioned, and trial production began on July 24.

Sun Yunan, legal affairs manager of Maple Leaf Pasture Food, said: "We plan to attract outstanding partners from upstream and downstream of the swine industry chain to the park, so that we can jointly reduce costs, share the benefits of technological advances and create market value together, generating the clustering effect of an industrial ecosystem."

In the future, the group will promote investment across the entire food industry chain at the Ufoodvalley Industrial Park, with the goal of reaching 10 billion yuan in annual output value and creating more than 3,500 jobs within three to five years, Sun said.