Chinese farmers make a fortune by livestreaming to sell agricultural products

Nông dân Trung Quốc kiếm bộn tiền nhờ livestream bán nông sản - 1 — Online sales activities of Chinese farmers (Photo: ANN).

Geru Drolma started digging for mushrooms on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at the age of six, following in the footsteps of her Tibetan parents, as her family earned a meager living by selling to nearby shops.

Fourteen years later, she shot to internet stardom after a video of her arduous mushroom digging was posted online and garnered half a million views.

In May 2017, Drolma, then 20, and her mother went to the snowy land near their home in Daocheng, in the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province, to look for cordyceps, a fungus that grows on caterpillars and is used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Ms. Drolma filmed a video of the process on her mobile phone to share on Kuaishou, a short video app she had downloaded a few months earlier.

The next day, when she logged into her Kuaishou account, she was stunned. The cordyceps video had been viewed 500,000 times and she had 3,000 new followers. Her inbox was flooded with messages asking about cordyceps prices.

She was surprised that "the boring routines of my life could be something interesting to others."

Ms. Drolma, who now has 2.2 million followers on Kuaishou, decided to cash in on her popularity by livestreaming local produce, an increasingly popular online marketing strategy.

The business was so successful that in 2019, she and her husband added other agricultural products to their online channel.

“Our customers place millions of online orders every year, and our cooperative's revenue can reach 5 million yuan a year (more than $700,000),” she said.

She is one of a growing number of Chinese farmers joining the wave of online sales in the country of a billion people.

China’s increasingly developed telecommunications infrastructure and cheap express delivery services have made it possible for Chinese farmers to bypass middlemen and deliver their products directly to consumers thousands of miles away.

In a report released in September, Kuaishou said that more than 870 million yuan (nearly $122 million) worth of agricultural products were sold on its platform in 2022 through live broadcasts in rural areas, up 55% year-on-year.

More than 300 million users of the platform have expressed interest in rural content. In January, Kuaishou launched a broadcasting training program aimed at promoting rural development.

The company said it has trained 100,000 rural residents in live-streaming skills in the first half of this year, equipping them with the skills needed to livestream rural life and promote the sale of agricultural products or traditional handicrafts.

The effort has created 250,000 jobs in some 25,000 towns nationwide.

As part of the plan, grassroots governments are required to encourage local branding. Ministry figures show that online retail sales of rural products reached 1.12 trillion yuan ($156 billion) in the first half of this year, up 12.5 percent year-on-year.

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