Taiping chicken in Teng County helps a rural woman onto the road to prosperity
The rural woman Xu Weiqin is a skilled chicken farmer in Erping Village, Yangba Town, Longnan City, Gansu Province. A few years ago, she recognized the prospects for local Taiping chicken farming, returned to her hometown and mobilized several villagers to join her in setting up a farming cooperative, and together they developed a chicken farming industry. Through several years of persistence, Xu Weiqin's "Taiping chicken" farming cooperative achieved considerable farming returns, and the "Taiping chicken" successfully pecked open Xu Weiqin's broad road to prosperity.
Erping Village, Yangba Town, Kang County is located at the junction of the three provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. Here the mountains are high and the forests dense, and transportation is inconvenient, so even today some villagers still live below the poverty line. Because the land is poor and the population sparse, and households are scattered, large livestock such as cattle and sheep are often harmed by black bears and wild boars, so few families raise them. Only one kind of local native chicken, the "Taiping chicken", has been kept and bred, because its leg bones are thick and its build is larger than that of ordinary chickens. However, because it grows slowly, the "Taiping chicken" was gradually replaced by meat chickens and even came close to extinction. In recent years, this local native chicken has recovered its population and has become a new hope for local villagers to escape poverty and become prosperous.
All of this is inseparable from the contribution of Xu Weiqin, a villager of Erping Village. Like many rural girls who have left school, in 2004, after Xu Weiqin graduated from Longnan Agricultural School, she had no work for a time. Their options were essentially two: one was to keep studying to take the civil service exam; the other was to go out to work, earn money, get married and live a life. In the years that followed, Xu Weiqin worked as a substitute teacher and also worked in the electronics market in Shenzhen, changing jobs several times.
Once, she went to eat with a good friend from work. The chicken pieces on the table, fattened with hormones but unappealing in both nutrition and taste, could not help but make Xu Weiqin think of the Taiping chicken from her hometown.
Where there is an idea, there is action. In 2010, with the help of the county government, Xu Weiqin coordinated subsidized loans for raising Taiping chickens and other matters, mobilized 4 village households to buy shares, raised 120,000 yuan, and built the Yangba Town Taiping Chicken Farming Cooperative in a place not far from the village. The cooperative found 25 relatively purebred "Taiping chickens" from the village and began breeding and hatching them. By the end of that year, 1,500 "Taiping chickens" had been marketed, generating an income of 15,000 yuan. Seeing that raising "Taiping chickens" could make money, Xu Weiqin provided breeding chickens to farmers in her own village and in surrounding villages such as Kejiahe, Tianba and Duba, letting them raise and breed them, and signed purchase and sales contracts with them. Under her leadership, more than 100 village households, including 45 poor households, have now joined the cooperative, and by the end of this year the inventory is expected to reach 100,000 chickens.
Because of her contribution to leading villagers out of poverty and toward prosperity, Xu Weiqin was named a "Youth Leader in Becoming Prosperous" by Kang County and was named "Kang County's Most Beautiful Youth" by the Communist Youth League of Kang County.
Xu Weiqin told reporters that the cooperative requires villagers to raise chickens in the original free-range way to guarantee the quality of the Taiping chickens marketed. As one of Gansu Province's three major fine local poultry breeds, the Taiping chicken, because of its tender meat, fine bones, crisp skin and fresh taste, is sold as far away as Chengdu and other places, and its price is considerably higher than that of ordinary meat chickens. Recently, she has also begun trying to use e-commerce platforms to expand the market and bring Taiping chicken to more consumers.
As the market expands, Xu Weiqin hopes there will be more policy support to help the cooperative expand its scale and further open up the market. "The farming industry involves relatively high risks and uncertainty, and there are problems such as difficulty in obtaining financing and the high cost of financing. Banks are generally unwilling to lend," she said. "I hope more poverty alleviation funds can be directed toward the farming industry."
Today, Xu Weiqin's "Taiping chicken" farming industry is developing better and better, and the scale of her farming cooperative is also continuously expanding. Under her leadership, more and more villagers are successfully embarking on the road out of poverty and toward prosperity by raising chickens, which greatly promotes the development of the local economy and productivity.