Leeches are terrifying, yet some people love farming them

I believe that for many farmers or people of farmer background, "leech" is a very terrifying animal. Just thinking about it or seeing one makes your heart crawl. However, as a type of traditional Chinese medicinal material, some people do raise leeches full-time and make considerable profits from it.

The leech, commonly known as the bloodsucker, has high medicinal value. In recent years, with the in-depth development of the leech's medicinal value, its range of applications has become broader and market demand is very large. As wild leech resources dwindle day by day and leech prices rise year after year, many people have thought of using artificial methods to farm leeches.

Five major advantages of farming leeches:

1. High and stable yield: Leeches are hermaphrodites, and every single one can reproduce, with a high reproduction rate.

2. Housewives and the elderly can all raise them: After putting in seedlings and enough snails, you only need to control water quality and ensure safety, saving water, electricity, labour and effort. One person can manage more than 10 mu.

3. Years of returns: After one introduction of breeding stock, their natural reproduction can sustain production year after year, achieving the goal of lowering costs and raising benefits.

4. Obvious benefits: Stocking 2000 breeding leeches per mu is worth more than 15000 yuan.

5. No limit on scale: Both large-area farming and small-area courtyard farming are possible.

Tempted by these five major advantages, many investors and farmers are naturally attracted. However, although the advantages exist, risks always coexist. If you want to profit from farming leeches, whenfarming leeches you need to pay special attention to:

1. Stock plenty of aquatic plants: mainly water hyacinth and duckweed. Leeches fear direct sunlight, so planting plenty of aquatic plants both serves as feed for the field snails and provides shade, and leeches can also lay eggs on them.

2. Provide sufficient feed: about 50 kg of field snails should be put into every 667 sq m of water surface. In addition, livestock and poultry blood clots should be put out for the leeches once a week, but the blood clots must not contain salt. To avoid affecting water quality, do not put the blood clots directly into the water. You can place the blood clots on a wooden block so they float on the water surface. After the leeches smell it, they will climb up to feed. The blood clots must not be left in place for more than two days.

3. Guard against escape: Build an escape-proof wall around the pond, with a height of 80-90 cm or more. Coat the inner side of the wall with cement and sand to make a rough surface. 4. After introduction, do not put the leeches directly into the pond: because during transport the leeches themselves produce a layer of mucous membrane as a protective film. Choose a shady, damp spot around the pond, put the leeches in it and let them crawl into the pond on their own, to reduce deaths.

5. Observe carefully: Leeches reproduce in the soil beneath the cover, not in the water. During the breeding period, if water floods over the soil bed for about 7 days, the leech eggs will die from lack of oxygen, so you should check carefully to ensure successful farming.

6. Harvest in time: The harvest period is generally in October. Sort the harvested leeches into large, medium and small. Pick out the large ones and put them back in the pond as breeding leeches; put the small ones in another pond to continue feeding, so that in the second year, when they reach more than 15 grams, they can be harvested and sold; the medium ones should immediately be processed into dried goods for sale.

Besides mastering leech farming techniques, there is also a crucial "three elements", namely intelligence, financial resources and material resources:

1. Investment of intelligence

(1) Understand the trends and supply-demand information of leech farming

(2) Master leech farming techniques, learn the primary processing methods for leeches, understand economic accounting, and only start farming after your own in-depth investigation and research, so as to avoid blindness as much as possible and reduce unnecessary economic losses.

2. Input of material and financial resources

(1) Site fencing: the length, size and materials of the site fence

(2) Seed source: the seed source of leeches can be collected in the wild or purchased.

(3) Bait: Large farms need to consider live food for the leeches to eat, or prepare animal blood

(4) Other inputs: water and electricity, transport, medicines, tools and machinery and equipment