Daba Mountain Agriculture

Daba Mountain - one of the purest places in China

Daba Mountain, Shaanxi, China

Experimental tea and agriculture on Daba Shan

Daba Mountain, listed by the World Wildlife Fund as one of the world's 200 ecoregions, this is one of the purest places in Asia.

Daba mountain is the most biologically rich area with one of the richest varieties of vegetation in all of China. Nowhere can you find more different species, including more than 50 broad-leaved genera and a dozen or more coniferous genera that flourish naturally here. The area has endless diverse micro-climates, they say anything and everything grows on the Daba Mountains, you just need to know where to go find it.

Trees of the Daba Mountains include oak, pine, elm, birch, ash, walnut, maple as well as ancient trees like the dawn redwood and the gingko, one of the oldest trees species in the world.

The valley area produces rice, winter wheat, bulk green tea, tobacco, cotton, millet, barley, and corn are also increasingly important crops, as is kaoliang (a variety of grain sorghum). On the higher ground, millet, oats, and buckwheat are common. Hemp, sesame, sugar beets, and rapeseed.

Deciduous forest ecoregion covers about 30% of Daba mountain. Daba mountains are very, very rich in selenium. What is grown here contains 20% more selenium than what is grown in similar growing areas. There are over 3,300-plus species of wild plants, 38 of them rare. The province has more than 800 species of medicinal plants of great economic value, including green tea, sea-buckthorn, gynostemma pentaphylla as well as very rare and sought after, high elevation green tea Qinba Wu Hao.

Fruit tree's found in the Daba mountains are Asian pear, orange, mandarin, lemon, kiwi, apricot, plum, jujube, pomegranate, persimmon, fig, chestnut and filbert.

The local government encourages sustainability, economic development and ecological protection . Local government has also developed environmentally-friendly fruit products and promoted organic apple-growing, as well as establishing 19 research centers for the development of new greener technologies. The area is a large ecological circle: farmers grow grass in orchards to feed livestock, their manure used to generate organic fertilizer.