Taming red junglefowl and taking a new path to prosperity through collective effort

Mo Yaogang feeding the red junglefowl.

"I never imagined that selling 200 red junglefowl the first time would bring in over 20,000 yuan, more than my entire year's net income from working away from home." In early April this year, Li Changjun, a red junglefowl farmer in Pingxi Village, Qinglong Township, Pingle County, said happily.

Last winter, 4 farming households in Pingxi Village joined a red junglefowl breeding project and, at the initiative of Mo Yaogang, a skilled red junglefowl breeder and secretary of the village general youth league branch, embarked on the path of red junglefowl farming. In the first quarter of this year, these 4 households sold 800 red junglefowl for a total income of over 80,000 yuan, successfully achieving their goal of escaping poverty and becoming prosperous. Overjoyed, they praised their "lead goose" Mo Yaogang to everyone they met.

The so-called "red junglefowl" is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken and is now a national second-class protected animal in China. Red junglefowl mainly eat grains and miscellaneous cereals, and can be fed with ordinary feed plus green grass and vegetable leaves. They can be raised in pens or cages using old houses and warehouses.

Mo Yaogang, 38 this year, has short hair and dark skin, and looks very energetic. When meeting him for the first time, he was busy feeding his silver pheasants. He said he has loved breeding since childhood. In 1998, he began raising pheasants on a small scale. However, due to a lack of experience in large-scale breeding, he suffered the first setback of his breeding career right from the start. As a result, he ended up in debt and was forced to go to Zhejiang to work and repay the debt.

However, he did not give up. After several years of working away from home and accumulating some funds, he returned to the village to start a business again. In 2010, Mo Yaogang learned from the internet about the good prospects of silver pheasant farming, so through distance education he worked hard to learn red junglefowl breeding and management techniques. With a loan from the National Youth Entrepreneurship Support Fund and more than 50,000 yuan of self-raised funds, he rebuilt the farm. That year he introduced 50 silver pheasant chicks from a breeding company in Zhejiang and once again took up the farming of rare poultry.

Hard work pays off. In 2015, he successfully obtained Guangxi's first "National Second-Class Protected Animal Silver Pheasant Breeding Qualification Certificate," and in 2016 registered and established Pingle County Xinyuan Rare Poultry Breeding Co., Ltd., embarking on the path of enterprise management in the breeding industry. Through several years of development, his red junglefowl farm has grown rapidly, with a total inventory of more than 6,000 birds. The varieties include red junglefowl, local chickens, and silver pheasants, and the categories are divided into breeding chickens, chicks, and laying hens. He counted on his fingers and did the math: there are 240 silver pheasants currently in cages, with breeding chicken prices reaching 500-800 yuan each, for a total value of between 120,000 and 192,000 yuan; commercial silver pheasants sell for 350 yuan each, with more than 100 in cages, for a total value of about 35,000 yuan; adding silver pheasant egg production and local chicken farming, the farm's product value has already exceeded 1 million yuan, and annual net income from breeding has reached more than 500,000 yuan. Mo Yaogang has become a widely known young entrepreneur skilled at achieving prosperity.

Having tasted initial success, he was full of confidence. However, amid his joy, Mo Yaogang also secretly worried. He said his farm currently faces a major development bottleneck: the number of birds leaving the cages is not high, making it impossible to supply the market in sufficient quantity.

"To solve this problem, we must guide and organize everyone to develop together as a group and take the path of scaled development. At the same time, helping more people get rich is also my duty as a people's congress representative." Therefore, since last year, Mo Yaogang has been rising early and staying up late, going from village to village and household to household to promote breeding techniques to villagers, providing red junglefowl chicks and technical support free of charge, and purchasing commercial chickens at agreed prices to expand the scale of birds leaving the cages. At the same time, he is also actively preparing to establish a red junglefowl breeding cooperative to attract more farmers to join and strive to achieve economies of scale.