Expanding and strengthening the chicken farming industry brings prosperity to the local people

Zhang Yifeng, a client of Henan Jinfeng Husbandry Equipment Co., Ltd., was born in January 1970. He is a member of the Communist Party of China and currently serves as general manager of Suqian Yifeng Poultry Co., Ltd. and Party branch secretary of the Suyu District Pioneer Poultry and Egg Production Cooperative. “Pioneer Village has many pioneers, and Pioneer Village is busy with entrepreneurship.” Walking into Yifeng Poultry Co., Ltd. in Pioneer Village, Daxing Town, for an interview felt like walking into a modern factory. Inside the factory, “workshops” stood in rows, tall and impressive.
“What is this?” the reporter asked Zhang Yifeng, pointing to the largest “workshop.”
“This is our modern breeding chicken hatching hall. It was put into use last summer, with a total area of more than 8,000 sq m. It hatches more than 2 million chicks each year. Most of the equipment is from Henan Jinfeng Company. Right now, this is the best in the whole city.” Zhang Yifeng said as he gave the reporter a thumbs-up. Zhang Yifeng told the reporter that he had been raising chickens for 20 years by then……
In the summer of 1991, Zhang Yifeng failed the college entrance examination. But although he failed the exam, he did not lose his ambition, and he firmly believed that there was more than one road to success.
After some thought and research, he found that raising chickens could also make money. Without capital, he wrote an IOU to a chick seller and bought 200 chicks on credit; without a chicken house, he built walls with soil on the vegetable plot in front of his home and covered the top with rice straw; without money to buy new chicken cages, he borrowed used “second-hand” ones others no longer used and took them home to rework. In less than two months, the 200 chicks grew up smoothly and were ready for market, earning more than 1,000 yuan.
The success of this first battle gave Zhang Yifeng great confidence. In 1992, he founded the Pioneer Laying Hen Farm, expanding the scale of chicken raising to 800 birds, and that year's sales revenue reached 12,000 yuan. Zhang Yifeng became a well-known local “ten-thousand-yuan household” through chicken farming.
The process of raising chickens was not always smooth. In 1993 and 1997, two sudden outbreaks of chicken plague caused large numbers of nearby broiler chickens to die, and many chicken farmers suffered serious losses. Zhang Yifeng also suffered considerable losses, but after he began using Henan Jinfeng's chicken-raising equipment, the scale of his chicken farm continued to expand and his income grew higher and higher.
In the process of taking the lead in entrepreneurship, Zhang Yifeng never forgot his identity as a Party member, and actively led many nearby farming households to engage in breeding and grow rich together. Whenever farming households encountered breeding problems, he would take the initiative to visit them and provide technical services free of charge.
As the number of local farming households increased, the people needed to buy large numbers of chicks. Zhang Yifeng keenly discovered that the chick market was in short supply, and that the quality of chicks sold on the market was unstable, with infectious diseases occurring from time to time. So he firmly seized this opportunity and began to study professional knowledge of breeding chicken production intensively. In the second half of 1999, he began raising breeding chickens, and in the spring of 2000 he began supplying chicks to a broad range of farming households. In the management and disease prevention of breeding chickens, he overcame the problem of “Marek's disease.” The chicks he hatched completely avoided Marek's disease, providing high-quality chicks to a broad range of farming households, increasing each farming household's income by nearly 10 yuan per bird on average and bringing farmers real benefits.
    In order to help more nearby farming households get on the path to prosperity by raising chickens, in 2005 Zhang Yifeng founded the “Pioneer Poultry and Egg Production Cooperative,” absorbing more than 500 nearby member households to raise chickens together. He adopted a “five unifications” management model for members: unified supply of breeding stock, unified feed, unified disease prevention, unified management, and unified sales. The “five unifications” management model greatly reduced members' sales risks and increased the sales income of a broad range of farming households.
In 2009, Zhang Yifeng invested 5 million yuan to found Suqian Yifeng Poultry Co., Ltd., built an 8,000 sq m breeding chicken hatching hall, and further raised its level in introducing talent, standardizing production, and chick quality management. Using equipment from Henan Jinfeng Husbandry Equipment Co., Ltd., he established an automated, fully enclosed modern breeding model.
In chick hatching, he eliminated the original heated hatching rooms and equipment all at once and replaced them with the most advanced tunnel-type incubators and circulating-type hatchers from Henan Jinfeng Husbandry Equipment Co., Ltd. This not only saved energy but also made it possible to hatch healthy chicks, increasing the survival rate of farming households' poultry raising by 2 percentage points. At the same time, the sales range of his chicks also expanded to Fujian, Shandong, Henan, Anhui and other provinces. Zhang Yifeng supplies 2 million chicks to society each year, creating more than 20 million yuan in benefits.
By leading people to start businesses and become rich through chicken farming, Zhang Yifeng has gained social recognition and has been commended by the government many times. From 1993 to the present, he has been rated as a leader in becoming rich and an expert in becoming rich every year, and has repeatedly been rated as an outstanding Communist Party member; in 2000, Zhang Yifeng's story appeared on China Central Television and was broadcast successively on CCTV-1 and CCTV-3; in 2004, in the “Top Ten and One Hundred Outstanding” activity held in Suyu District, he was rated as one of the top ten entrepreneurial talents; in the same year, he was awarded the title of “May 1st Labor Model” and was elected a member of the Suyu District CPPCC; in July 2007, he was rated as one of the top ten rural Party member and cadre entrepreneurship pacesetters in Suyu District. In July 2009, Suqian Yifeng Poultry Co., Ltd. was rated as a municipal rural practical talent entrepreneurship demonstration base and a “demonstration project” for entrepreneurial young Communist Party members. In the same year, it was awarded the title of “Ecological Breeding Demonstration Park” by the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry. “In all my years of raising chickens, my greatest achievement is not how much money I made from raising chickens, but leading my fellow villagers to become rich together through raising chickens and solving their worries about raising chickens,” Zhang Yifeng said with no small amount of pride.