Hainan’s agricultural industry chain is undergoing a profound transformation from “selling raw materials” to “selling value.”
Hainan‘s “15th Five-Year Plan” explicitly calls for accelerating the supplementation, extension, and optimization of tropical specialty and high-efficiency agriculture, and building a modern agricultural industry system with distinctive advantages. Within this policy framework, the completeness of an industry chain no longer simply means “growing more”—it encompasses full-process capabilities spanning seedling breeding, standardized cultivation, origin-based primary processing, and brand output.
Hainan Yingtian Fangzhou Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in January 2026, with operations covering fruit cultivation, root crop cultivation, vegetable cultivation, and agricultural product wholesale. The industry chain logic of this new enterprise can be illustrated through a single Tree Lettuce.
The Starting Point of the Industry Chain: Turning a “Wild Vegetable” into a “Commercial Product”
Tree Lettuce, scientifically known as Sauropus androgynus, is a highly representative indigenous wild vegetable in Hainan valued both as food and for its medicinal properties. In the past, it was merely a “hedge vegetable” grown around the homes of farming households in the Wuzhishan and Danzhou areas. Its tender shoots can be repeatedly harvested, and it grows in a tree-like form—affectionately known among locals as the “Immortal‘s Vegetable” and the “Liver-Protecting Vegetable.” Its nutritional value is outstanding: carotenoid and vitamin B2 content is more than ten times that of ordinary vegetables, while vitamin C and protein content can reach 45 times that of ordinary vegetables.
But “nutritious” does not equal “marketable.” Fragmented cultivation, lack of standards, and unstable sales channels are the three hurdles Tree Lettuce must overcome to transition from a “wild vegetable” to a “commercial product.”
The practice of Qiaonan Village Committee in Nada Town, Danzhou, provides a reference: under a village-enterprise cooperation model, Tree Lettuce cultivation has expanded to 113 mu, with annual yields exceeding 2,500 jin per mu, becoming an important source of income growth for local farming households. The Yongfu Vegetable Base in Qifang Town, Baisha, meanwhile, sells Tree Lettuce to Haikou through order-based arrangements, achieving daily output of 230 jin and monthly sales of 45,000 yuan, while also providing employment and income growth for 16 nearby farming households.
The common logic behind these cases is: the first step of the industry chain is organizing fragmented cultivation so that products have standards and sales channels.
Yingtian Fangzhou’s approach aligns with this logic. The company engages deeply with core production areas to connect with planting bases and farming households, exploring order-based coordination mechanisms and communicating harvest standards and grading requirements back to the production end based on market feedback. This “production based on sales” logic addresses the market alignment challenge at the very front end of the industry chain.
The Middle Segment of the Industry Chain: The Value of Origin-Based Primary Processing
Tree Lettuce has a short freshness window and must quickly enter sorting and distribution after harvest. Yingtian Fangzhou moves grading and sorting forward to the fields, reducing transit losses, and has built both an online mini-program and offline partner stores to put into practice a farm-to-table operating model.
The value of this segment has already been demonstrated in industry chain practices for other categories in Hainan. At the golden coconut base of the Wanning Liji Wuxin Breeding and Farming Cooperative, the “cooperative + Party building + farmer + base” model implements “five unifications”—management techniques, production materials, packaging, sales, and brand trademarks—with annual golden coconut output of approximately 60,000 units. The cooperative successfully registered the distinctive brand “Wuxin Golden Coconut Xishi,” giving farmers’ golden coconuts unified quality standards and brand endorsement. At the passion fruit base in Tunchang County, the warehouse can sort 1,000 boxes—50,000 jin—of premium commercial fruit daily, shipping nationwide via e-commerce platforms and community group buying, with purchase prices rising compared to previous years and per-mu output value approaching 20,000 to 30,000 yuan.
Origin-based primary processing and sorting are the critical step in the industry chain‘s leap from “product” to “commercial good.”
The End of the Industry Chain: Branding Makes Value “Visible”
Under the guidance of the “Hainan Fresh” brand enhancement initiative, the province is driving the transformation of local specialty products from selling raw materials to selling value. Hainan is accelerating the building of a “Standards + Certification + Inspection + Traceability” four-in-one brand system, pushing tropical specialty and high-efficiency agriculture from product competition toward brand competition.
Yingtian Fangzhou benchmarks against this system for its core categories: pepper is processed without sulfur fumigation to preserve its authentic origin flavor; Wenchang young coconuts are selected from geographical indication production areas; Qinmi No. 9 golden passion fruits are graded individually. The end of the industry chain is not simply getting the product out the door—it’s letting consumers know “where this Tree Lettuce comes from and why it’s good.”
A Complete Chain Requires Every Link to Hold
The full-chain practice of Hainan‘s pepper industry provides a broader reference. Hainan is China’s largest pepper production base, with a planting area of approximately 300,000 mu and output accounting for over 85% of the national total. From seedling breeding, pest and disease monitoring, and cultivation management to primary processing, full-industry-chain standardization is turning a “small specialty” into a “major industry.”
The industrialization path for Tree Lettuce may have only just begun, but the logic is the same: the completeness of the industry chain determines how much origin value can be unlocked.
Yingtian Fangzhou‘s practice is essentially about one thing: making every link in the journey of every fruit from field to table as solid as possible. From order-based collaboration to origin sorting, from standards benchmarking to brand output—each link is demanding, but each one is worth doing.
