Amazed by our rice breeding and plugging techniques brought from Tianjin, local Bulgaria farmers expressed their wish to borrow our technology. Zheng Yonghai, Tianjin Food Group Bulgaria Project Production Manager, who has been working in Bulgaria since 2016, said that just yesterday his company negotiated with a farmer who farms 5,000 acres of rice.

The Bulgarian project was established by Tianjin Food Group (then Tianjin Agricultural Reclamation Group) in 2011, responding to the national "Agriculture Goes Out" policy. In its initial period, the project mainly engaged in international trade farmed on rented land.  

Zheng Yonghai usually gets up at 7 o'clock to check the crops' growth and health with the locally hired agrotechnical technicians. "The project now has over 60 local employees. Sometimes we sit together with local farmers, exchanging experience and share our farming technology," said Zheng.  "Our work has in a sense brought local intensive farming to a new stage, releasing local farmers from a rain-dependent situation."

In 2014, 182,000 tons of corn produced in Bulgaria arrived in China, the first time China had imported corn from the country.

In 2017, Bulgaria became the first China-Central and Eastern Europe Agricultural Cooperation Demonstration Zone.

"Next, we will build a feed processing plant in Bulgaria. At the same time, planning for bases of edible oil, mineral water and edible fungi is also under active preparation.  A cooperation agreement has been signed with Huami Rice Industry Co., Ltd. to introduce fine millet varieties into Bulgaria on an experimental basis, which is meant to further create a recycling economy for agricultural product processing, and extend the group industry," Zheng said, adding that the project will cooperate with more than 20 scientific research institutions such as local universities, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Tianjin Academy of Agricultural Sciences to form an agricultural research base in the local area.