Two years ago, I helped transport tung nuts from rural collection points to a factory where they were to be produced. I did it as a bit of a research project to get to know more about the inner workings of the local tung oil industry. There were few people willing to give clear information otherwise.
The important facts I was able to learn were what quality of tung nuts the factories will and will not buy and the best areas to find the best quality nuts. Ironically, the Sanjiang County area, stretching up into Southeastern Guizhou Province, is a huge base for tung nut production, but they are almost all shipped out of the area for processing.
Unfortunately, when we took our nuts to the crushing factory, they grabbed a few nuts off the top of one of the trucks as the sample for quality testing. We had just happened to throw a few last bags of random nuts up on top of a mound of high quality nuts. So, they tested from the very few bags of poor quality nuts, when there were tons of excellent quality nuts just below. Thus began a three-day struggle to get the money we deserved out of those nuts, but I guess that is just one of those obstacles which always seem to come up in business.
Anyway, they tried to convince me that the nuts we had were poor quality, as were all the nuts they had seen from the area from which we brought them. In reality, the majority of our tung nuts were far better quality than the mounds filling their factory floor.
Sanjiang County, where our consulting business is based, has some large areas of excellent quality tung nuts, but the real high volume seems to come out of Guizhou Province. The trick is that the closest producer to Guizhou Province's Congjiang, Rongjiang, and Liping counties is across the provincial border, through our county, and down to the cities. There is no decent sized operation any closer. So, though Sanjiang is not as big a producer as some nearby counties, all their tung nuts flow through here.
