Crop you can count on promises harvest of good fortune

Alfalfa being cut in the fields at the Escalante Ranch in Utah. The Chinese businessman Zhang Renwu paid "something over $10 million" for the 8,900-hectare ranch and is growing alfalfa for export to China. [Photo/China Daily]

Healthier cattle feed from down on the ranch, Zhang Yuwei reports.

Around noon on a sunny, early June day in northern Utah, Frank Biggs is on his tractor, busily cutting the season's alfalfa harvest on the Escalante Ranch for a second time. The plant, a member of the pea family and grown as a forage crop in many countries, will be turned into hay and exported as animal feed.

A middle-aged Chinese man waves to Biggs from across the field, carrying a bowl of soup noodles in one hand.

He is Zhang Renwu, 46, founder of Lu Tian Yuan (Green Pasture) Ecological Farm Co in Beijing and the new owner of Escalante, which means "ladder" or "staircase" in Spanish.

"My new boss really appreciates my work, and he even delivers the lunch he made to my tractor. That never happened before," said Biggs, a 37-year-old native of the tiny town of Jensen (population 400), where the ranch is located, who has worked at Escalante for eight years.

The 8,900-hectare ranch, which was put on the market for $16 million last year, was previously owned by a billionaire in Tennessee who used it as a vacation resort and visited just once or twice a year for hunting.

Zhang, who has been in the alfalfa hay import-export business for about two decades, had been searching for just such a deal. In December, two months after visiting the ranch, he signed a deal to buy it. Zhang wouldn't disclose how much he paid, but he said it was "something over $10 million" and "reasonable".

"I'll use the ranch differently from the previous owner, for growing alfalfa. The 1,416 hectares of irrigated land and the surroundings are great for that," he said.

The purchase, Biggs recounted, "caught a few people off guard" when they heard the buyer was a Chinese businessman - a first for Jensen, as far as anyone could tell.

"Now you find Chinese people buying all sorts of businesses, such as vineyards and hotels, in the United States and other countries, but I want to do something different and also something for a better cause," said Zhang.

"It is important to provide high-quality alfalfa hay for cows in China to maintain the high quality of dairy produce. It's a big mission and one I want to continue," he explained.

After the purchase, Zhang kept Biggs on as ranch manager. He also kept on two of the ranch hands.

"They know their business very well, and they are very hard-working people," he said.

"My new boss actually cares about the employees. He is different from my old boss. As long as he treats me fairly, I will continue to work for him, just like any other job," said Biggs.