FUZHOU, March 24 (Xinhua) -- In the national market for snow fungus, a single mountainous county in east China's Fujian Province now arguably sets the pace.

Gutian, once a reservoir resettlement zone with limited arable land, has engineered an industrial business by controlling over 90 percent of China's snow fungus production. In 2025, the county's edible fungi industrial chain reached a total output value of 31.5 billion yuan (about 4.57 billion U.S. dollars), with its products reaching over 20 countries and regions.

Gutian's rise was driven by necessity. As Fujian's largest resettlement area for hydropower projects, the county faced a severe shortage of farmland.

Local farmers turned to the mountains in the 1960s, pioneering "bag-based" cultivation techniques that replaced traditional wood logs with low-cost, accessible raw materials, said Lei Yinqing, an official with the county's edible fungi industry development center.

The technical shift was the turning point, Lei said, adding that the continuous efforts to innovate techniques have allowed local farmers to cultivate 38 different fungi varieties and scale production to over 1 million tonnes of fresh fungi annually.

The industry's growth has not been without challenges. Zhang Jiaqiao, head of Ningde Shengnong Agricultural Development Co., Ltd., said, "The traditional small-scale farming model hit a bottleneck. We realized the future lay in green, standardized cultivation and deep processing."

Zhang's team invested in automated, climate-controlled mushroom houses. "The smart monitoring system regulates temperature and humidity automatically, allowing for year-round production while doubling output and significantly reducing labor costs," Zhang added.

The shift toward deep processing has targeted younger consumers. Gutian now produces a wide range of value-added goods, including instant snow fungus soup and skincare products like facial masks.

Lin Liuju, manager of a Fujian-based food processing company, noted that the new products have helped the company achieve an annual output value exceeding 100 million yuan.

To sustain its competitive edge, Gutian has collaborated with local universities and established an edible fungi research and development (R&D) center, a mushroom research institute. The county is home to over 30 corporate and private research institutes focusing on automation and intelligent processing.

The local government is also promoting tourism featuring the mushroom industry, offering tours where tourists can observe the full industrial cycle from cultivation to processing.

"The immediate feedback from consumers at these experience workshops is directly linked back to our R&D departments to refine products," a local official said.