BEIJING, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities have given the title "Model of the Times" to a group of forest farm workers in a remote northwestern county for their unswerving desert-fighting and afforestation efforts since the early 1980s.

The three generations of workers at the Babusha Forest Farm in Gulang County, Gansu Province have managed to turn their hometown on the southern edge of the Tengger Desert into livable green land from an inhospitable place where farmland and villages were long plagued by sand erosion, according to a statement by the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Over the past 38 years, the farm workers have taken 14,467 hectares of desert under control through afforestation and kept 25,000 hectares of land off limits to allow trees and grass to regenerate, the statement said.