In Baishiyuan Village, Gaoqiao Town, Changsha County, Hunan Province, a modern cold storage facility renovated from an old school building operates in an orderly manner. Fresh peanut seedlings, green pea seedlings and other agricultural products are preserved at a constant temperature here, ready to be shipped to all parts of the country. This cold chain facility, which boosts the development of rural industries, was once an old school building that had been idle for many years with dormant resources.
How to awaken the “dormant assets” and transform them into driving forces for development was once a difficult problem facing Baishiyuan Village. During the investigation, the village Party General Branch found that the village and its surrounding areas are rich in characteristic agricultural products, but the storage and preservation capacity is insufficient. This problem has become a bottleneck restricting industrial development. Thus, the direction of agricultural product cold chain storage was determined for development.
The village actively strived for the provincial cold storage and preservation facility construction project and introduced a professional hydroponic peanut seedling enterprise to start the construction under the mode of “village collective + enterprise + farmer households”. In 2021, the first peanut seedling cold storage workshop converted from the former site of Baishiyuan Primary School was completed, with a 1,100-cubic-meter pre-cooling warehouse and a high-temperature cold storage warehouse. It not only meets the needs of production and cold storage, but also realizes the function of temperature – controlled hydroponics.
Although villagers questioned the project at the initial stage, the village collective responded with concrete achievements. Peanut seedlings are not only sold to Changsha Higreen Market and major hotels, but also shipped to the whole country through JD Express, Meituan and other channels, with a huge demand market. In 2025, the output value of the peanut seedling industry in the village exceeded 4 million yuan, driving more than 50 villagers to find employment nearby and distributing more than 600,000 yuan in wages. The village collective also obtained a stable income of 100,000 yuan through cold storage rental, winning wide recognition from villagers.
Since then, Baishiyuan Village has continued to make efforts to develop the “cold” assets into a “booming” business. To meet the needs of the local tea industry, a 520-cubic-meter high-standard tea cold storage and preservation warehouse has been built, which can accurately control the temperature and store more than 40 tons of tea, helping the cooperative tea factories double their benefits. Meanwhile, through investment promotion and the rental dividend model, the remaining idle factory buildings have been revitalized, and four cold storage warehouses with a total volume of 7,000 cubic meters have been built, three of which have been successfully rented out. The characteristic industries in the village have expanded from peanut seedlings to pea seedlings and other varieties, and a new mechanism of “village-group cooperation, group-level profit sharing and nearby employment” has been explored to directly bring the dividends of development to villagers.
Now, the cold chain industry chain in Baishiyuan Village is still expanding. Cooperative enterprises introduce equipment and plan to process some agricultural products into ready-to-eat food, deepen cooperation with e-commerce platforms to expand sales channels, and gradually build an integrated service system covering production, sales and processing. The four cold storage warehouses have become the “heart” of the development of rural industries, and an industrial chain integrating storage and preservation, production and planting, e-commerce sales and food processing has initially taken shape.
From idle school buildings to modern cold storage warehouses, and from single – crop planting to diversified integration, Baishiyuan Village has taken the revitalization of idle resources as the entry point and cold chain facilities as the enabling carrier to transform “cold resources” into a “booming economy”. It has achieved an annual increase of more than 100,000 yuan in the village collective economy and an average daily income increase of more than 100 yuan for villagers who are employed near their homes, blazing a new path of rural revitalization featuring resource activation, industrial efficiency improvement, collective income increase and villagers’ prosperity.