Nestled at the southern foot of the Qinling Mountains in China, Lueyang County is known for its ecological environment as a suitable area for the growth of traditional Chinese medicinal herbs.
Despite the region’s rich natural resources, the county was once designated for national poverty-alleviation support and remained heavily dependent on government assistance. Today, two new protected plant varieties are helping to unlock the region’s agricultural potential, create new livelihood opportunities and drive industrial development.
The plant is Gastrodia elata, known as Tian Ma (天麻) in Chinese: an orchid species whose rhizome has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 2,000 years. Studies on its traditional medicinal applications suggest that processed products derived from the plant may help lower blood lipid and blood pressure levels, improve insomnia, and relieve fatigue.
The protected new varieties of Tian Ma are Luema No.1 and Luema No.2, both developed specifically for Lueyang's conditions and now protected under China's plant variety rights system.
Breeding for these two varieties began in 2010, when the Development Service Center of Chinese Medicinal Materials Industry of Lueyang County partnered with Shaanxi Hanwang Lueyang Traditional Chinese Medicine Technology Co., Ltd., with research support from the Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.
Applications for plant variety rights were submitted to the Office for the Protection of New Plant Varieties under China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2022. The rights were granted in 2024, making Luema No.1 and Luema No.2 the first and second Tian Ma varieties ever to be granted breeders' rights, enabling the strong foundation for the commercial chain that followed.
Dr. Dong Linlin, the lead breeder, describes what distinguishes each variety:
"Luema No.1 is characterized by strong fecundity, few diseases, good quality and high yield, making it an ideal variety for both medicinal and edible purposes. Luema No.2 has attracted much attention due to its advantages such as large and numerous fruits, clear and distinct annulations on Tian Ma tubers, and significantly high active ingredient content and yield."
Once a variety is granted PVP, the breeder's intellectual property rights are legally protected. At present, the breeder: Shaanxi Hanwang Lueyang Traditional Chinese Medicine Technology Co., Ltd., has established seedling nurseries and propagation bases and maintains control over the original seed stock to ensure the authenticity and quality of the seeds sold to farmers.
Developing a superior variety is only half the challenge. Getting it into the hands of farmers, and ensuring they can cultivate it well, is the other half. To bridge that gap, China’s Development Service Center organized technical teams to provide hands-on training to local growers, covering every critical stage of Tian Ma cultivation, from selecting the symbiotic fungus material and planting seed tubers, through growth management, all the way to harvesting and seed retention. In 2025, 864 farmers benefited from this training programme.
What that training means in practice is best understood through the people doing the work. Ms. Yang Li tends a Tian Ma planting base in Lueyang County, where local farmers cultivate carefully managed growing plots beneath the shade of oak trees.
In the busy spring season, her work involves what growers call "basket-turning": opening the cultivation baskets in which Tian Ma grows, checking the development of tubers, inspecting for contamination or pests, adjusting the substrate materials to promote better growth, and repacking the baskets. It is skilled, attentive work that reflects how different modern Tian Ma cultivation is from simple open-field farming.
"I have taken part in the whole process from planting to harvesting Tian Ma," Yang Li says. "It is great to work locally, and the wage of 100 CNY per day is reasonable. I just hope the farmers' cooperative will develop more industries so that we can have long-term employment here."
For Ms. Yang Li, who had no regular income after becoming a full-time caregiver, Tian Ma cultivation has offered something beyond a wage: the ability to contribute economically, in her own community, on a schedule that fits her life.
The cooperative Yang Li refers to has been operating since 2010. The Lueyang Changshan Traditional Chinese Medicinal Materials Planting Farmers' Professional Cooperative was founded in February 2010 by 15 households from a village in the county.
Starting small, it has grown into a model of collective agricultural development, absorbing impoverished member households and local farming families into joint employment and shared industry.
The cooperative operates on a straightforward principle: unified technology, management, and sales. Farmers are not left to navigate markets or cultivation decisions alone; they work within a system designed to give every member access to the same standards, knowledge, and commercial channels. The cooperative currently has a stock of 30,000 nests of the protected Tian Ma varieties in the field.
For households previously lifted out of poverty, it has helped develop more than 10,000 nests of Tian Ma, raising per-household income by more than 3,000 CNY (approximately US$439), helping more than 60 rural households cross that income threshold from zero.
One of the noteworthy features of Lueyang's Tian Ma PVP model is where the growing happens: under oak trees, not on open agricultural land. Tian Ma is a mycoheterotrophic plant, meaning it does not photosynthesize but instead draws its nutrition through a symbiotic relationship with a fungus called Armillaria mellea (honey fungus), which grows on rotting wood.
Oak forests provide the ideal environment, offering shade and humidity for the plant, while fallen leaves form a nutrient-rich layer supporting honey fungus growth. The result is that cultivation happens on forested hillsides that would otherwise generate no agricultural income, without displacing a single food crop.
The system is also designed for resource recovery. The fungus-inoculated wood used in Tian Ma cultivation can be repurposed after harvest to grow other medicinal fungi such as polyporus or be processed into organic fertilizer or biomass fuel. Once fully depleted, the wood material can be returned to nature, closing the production cycle with minimal waste.
In 2025, Luema No.1 and Luema No.2 were cultivated across approximately 267 hectares of the county.
The two varieties now feed into more than 20 distinct products, including Tian Ma capsules, biscuits, noodles, and wine. The number of large-scale processing and distribution enterprises using Tian Ma as a raw material grew from zero to nine between 2023 and 2025.
In 2025, the entire Tian Ma industry chain in Lueyang reached an output value of approximately 730 million RMB (roughly 110 million USD), signifying a 20.5% increase from 2022. (Source: Lueyang County government data)
At the heart of this commercial ecosystem sits the Central and Western China Tian Ma Trading Center, co-built by the county government and its partners, which opens for trading on the 8th and 28th of every month. It has become an important trading venue for the national Tian Ma industry. Each session sees an average transaction volume of 50 to 60 tonnes of Tian Ma, with a turnover of 10 to 12 million CNY. Since its opening, the center's cumulative transaction value has exceeded 160 million CNY, connecting more than 500 growers with over 150 pharmaceutical dealers nationwide.
The promotion of Luema No.1 and Luema No.2 has also been listed among the ten most impactful cases of agricultural plant variety right utilization in 2024 selected by China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
To make that list, a new variety must have received breeders' rights, demonstrated high industrial value, and offered experience that is replicable and scalable for other regions and crops.
That last criterion matters most because Lueyang is not a uniquely privileged place. It is a mountainous, formerly poor county in inland China that invested in breeding, protected that investment through the plant variety rights system, trained its farmers, built cooperative structures, and created a market to connect supply with demand. The result is a US$107 million industry value-chain, thousands of farming households with rising incomes, and a forest ecosystem put to sustainable use.
It is a dynamic that UPOV's framework is designed to enable: breeders innovate when their work is recognized and protected; farmers benefit from better varieties; and communities build industries on solid agricultural foundations.
In Lueyang's oak forests, that chain is working exactly as intended.