That time is upon us again. It is not exactly a celebrated season of the year, but farmers from Guangxi, Guizhou, and Hunan Provinces are preparing for the tung nuts to fall.
You may not be able to eat them, but you can sure sell them. Though, the rumor is that feeding tung oil to dogs will make them sterile...but you did not hear that here, because more than likely, it will kill them or give them a nasty stomach ache.
The annual process of harvesting, drying, and selling off the tung nuts comes some time in late September or November. Soon, the local tung oil "bosses" will be roaming the area looking for the best nuts they can find.
The process is a little tricky, actually. Some tung oil manufacturers will literally turn away trucks full of tung nuts at the gate if the nuts are too far below the current "norm" which they are accepting. It depends on the year and the quality of nuts for that year.
If all the trucks coming in have high quality nuts, any truck with low quality nuts will be turned away. If high quality happens to be hard to come by, well then, just about anybody can get in. That is for the picky manufacturers, though.
Usually, the local tung oil manufacturers will buy anything they can get their hands on. The bigger factories, like in Liuzhou, will buy such huge quantities, the small guys in places like little old Sanjiang County are scrambling to pick up any truck loads they can keep from going down to Liuzhou.
Back to the farmers, though. If the year's crop is low quality, the price will also be low. So, when the "bosses"—these are the representatives from the tung oil manufacturers who roam the countryside buying tung nuts to ship to the factory—come to buy the nuts, farmers will find out fast if the selling price is worth the trouble or not.
If the price is too low, the farmers do not even want to go through the trouble of picking the fruit up off the ground, drying, bagging, and hauling them into the closest collection point. That is truly amazing to me. These are the same farmers that will scramble for an hour to catch a snake to sell for $5! If the price is too low for their trouble, it must be amazingly low.
I have not heard much about this year's crop yet, but it is always an interesting process in rural business. Truck loads of fragrant (well, to me anyway) tung nuts will be passing through Sanjiang in the next month or so, and the factories will be buzzing with activity while there are still nuts to crush.
