Guangzhou, Monday, 24 November 2025.
Last Sunday Chimelong Group staged a hands-on rice harvest in Guangzhou to showcase a program that converts safari and theme-park animal manure into fermented organic fertilizer used on community rice plots. For retail professionals, the striking takeaway is operational: combining pathogen-controlled composting with smart-ag tools—drone seeding and intelligent field management—lifted early rice yields by roughly 30% versus smallholder practice while reducing pesticide use and creating experiential CSR content. The event doubled as public education and charity outreach, strengthening local supply-chain relationships and adding provenance-rich storytelling for agrifood and retail channels. Key implementation considerations include feedstock logistics, fermentation and pathogen protocols, nutrient testing, regulatory compliance for on-farm reuse, and multi-site scalability. This case outlines a pragmatic closed-loop model that can lower disposal costs and embodied emissions, deepen community partnerships, and create differentiated, traceable product narratives valuable to retailers pursuing sustainability and farm-to-shelf transparency.
Event overview and strategic framing
Last Sunday Chimelong Group staged a hands-on rice-harvest event in Yuantan township, Qingyuan — part of the company’s ‘Let the Mountains See the Sea’ charity strand — to demonstrate a program that converts safari and theme-park animal manure into fermented organic fertilizer used on nearby community rice plots [1][3][4]. The activity combined public education, volunteer participation and charity framing to highlight circular-waste management across Chimelong’s safari and theme-park operations [1][3].
Operational pipeline: from manure to market-ready organic fertilizer
Chimelong’s team described a process of centralized collection of rare-animal manure, followed by professional fermentation treatment designed to eliminate harmful bacteria while retaining nutrients; the firm and its science educators say this yields a high-quality organic fertilizer applied in experimental ‘mineral pure organic’ fields [1][3][4]. Organizers emphasised the need for pathogen-control during fermentation as well as nutrient testing before agricultural reuse — practical steps required to meet on-farm safety and regulatory expectations for recycled bio-waste [1][3].
Yield and smart-agriculture outcomes reported at the site
Organisers reported that the combination of the fermented organic fertilizer and a suite of smart-agriculture tools — notably drone seeding and intelligent field management systems — increased early rice yields in Yuantan by about 30% compared with scattered smallholder practice, with local early-rice output reported at roughly 1,100 jin per mu under the demonstration regimen [3][4]. To illustrate the implied baseline yield behind the 30% uplift, the backward calculation based on the reported figures can be written as 846.154 (yield per mu before the uplift) and the percent-change expression as 30 using the numbers reported by organisers [3][4]. [alert! ‘Units reported in sources use jin and mu (traditional Chinese measures); conversion to SI units was not performed because the event sources provided these figures in local units’] [3][4].
Environmental and cost implications for park operations
For park operators, converting animal bio-waste to usable fertilizer can reduce on-site disposal costs and lower embodied emissions associated with external waste transport and off-site treatment, while creating an internal feedstock stream for adjacent agrifood partnerships — an integrated waste valorization model showcased by Chimelong’s event and accompanying outreach materials [1][3][4]. The program’s on-the-ground implications include designing feedstock logistics, establishing robust composting and pathogen-management protocols, and implementing nutrient management testing to ensure agronomic performance and regulatory compliance for agricultural reuse [1][3][4].
Commercial and experiential value for retailers and food-chain partners
Beyond operational savings, the Chimelong example creates provenance-rich storytelling that can be valuable to retailers and supply‑chain partners seeking farm-to-shelf traceability and differentiated sustainable products: experiential CSR content (public harvests, educational programming) reinforces product narratives and local sourcing ties that retailers increasingly prize [1][3]. The event doubled as a community engagement tool and a demonstration of how leisure operators can develop sold-through supply chains for agrifood products derived from park-captured circular streams [1][3][4].
Scalability, regulatory and technical caveats
Scaling this closed-loop model across multi-site operators requires careful attention to several constraints raised implicitly by the demonstration: feedstock variability (different species’ manure have distinct nutrient and pathogen profiles), logistics of transporting manure without cross-contamination, validated fermentation processes that meet local agricultural regulations, laboratory nutrient and residue testing, and traceability systems that maintain product claims through retail channels [1][3][4]. Industry practitioners assessing similar programs should plan for capital outlays in composting infrastructure, QA/QC microbial testing, and smart‑ag integrations (e.g., drones, field sensors) to replicate the reported yield and quality improvements [1][3][4].
Context: leadership signals and industry positioning
Chimelong’s public-facing sustainability and community initiatives come as the company’s leadership has been increasingly visible on the global attractions stage — a factor that shapes the operator’s capacity to pilot vertically integrated, cross-sector projects that tie tourism, conservation, and local agriculture together [5][1]. The rice-harvest showcase positions Chimelong not only as an entertainment operator but as an experimenter in ‘tourism + agriculture’ models that can underpin rural revitalisation messaging and agrifood partnerships [3][4][1].
Bronnen