Raise ugly chickens, bald chickens, garlic chickens - you can still make money

Is this a dumb chicken? Or a bald chicken? Could it be a gamecock? His name is Yang Hongqian, and these chickens with off-the-charts fighting power are the ones he raises. To raise this kind of chicken, he almost personally ruined his own good life. And because of these aggressive chickens, he turned things around in four years, and in 2016, sales exceeded 6 million yuan! Watch how Old Yang relied on the fighter chickens among chickens to achieve his dream!

His name is Yang Hongqian.

On this nursery of more than 300 mu, he raises more than 12,000 chickens, and every one of these chickens is a handful.

Yang Hongqian: If they run into one they don't like, they start fighting at the slightest disagreement.

These guys, before fighting, first stand up the feathers on their heads. Whether they can win or not, they intimidate the opponent first.

Yang Hongqian: That one belongs to the type with off-the-charts fighting power, meaning it's not afraid of anyone bigger or smaller than it, the one with no feathers on its neck, right. There are basically no feathers left on its body; it's the type that can't win unless it takes its clothes off to fight.

Hui Hui: That one in the distance too.

Old Yang: Right, that one is also pretty fierce.

Hui Hui: That one has also been fought until it has no feathers left.

Look at this guy, it's been fought until it barely has any feathers left, and it's still looking for opponents everywhere.

Old Yang says his chickens have off-the-charts fighting power because they live especially freely.

Every morning, Old Yang lets them out of the chicken pen, and these more than 12,000 chickens roam freely in this woodland of more than 300 mu all day long! When they have nothing to do, they look for bugs, fight a bit, and every now and then climb trees to swing. Not only that, these chickens are at least 6 months old, and in Old Yang's words, they have especially rich combat experience.

Old Yang is going to hold a competition at the base today. Although the big roosters are formidable, he still has to catch two as prizes.

Don't think that just because chickens are everywhere around your feet, catching them is easy.

Yang Hongqian: This way of catching them definitely won't work. Because as soon as it sees a person getting close, it directly flies away. When we usually catch them, we have to slowly approach from behind. Catching just one chicken is too much trouble. Catching one or two during the day is still okay, but catching them in bulk won't work. With more than a dozen people, you can't catch more than a few in an hour.

Worker: These chickens are very good at fighting, aggressive, and quite wild. So they're hard to catch during the day; you can only catch them at night.

We had just prepared a big rooster when Old Yang's guests arrived one after another. Today, what he is going to hold is an egg-collecting competition for children.

Yang Hongqian: We know our country has a missile force. Ours is not missiles but finding eggs. We go into the woods to look for chicken eggs. The children wear our hats, then take baskets to look for eggs. The child with the most eggs collected, we will reward with this big rooster.

The people Yang Hongqian invited were all his customers. First, it was to let them see how the chickens they usually buy grow up, so they can buy with confidence in the future; second, if everyone has a good time and posts on Moments, they can become one living advertisement after another for Old Yang.

Child: Auntie, I found a chicken egg.

Hui Hui: How many did you collect?

Child: Two.

Child: I have the most.

The competition was very simple, and the children had a great time. In the end, the big rooster was won by this little girl. It happened to be mealtime, so Yang Hongqian set up an iron pot and made iron-pot stewed chicken for everyone.

Yang Hongqian: To treat everyone today, the boss personally cooked.

Yang Hongqian was in charge of stir-frying the chicken pieces, while this older brother stuck flatbread around the edge of the pot. Old Yang said this is the stewed chicken with flatbread that local people like most.

Delicious, delicious.

As soon as the flatbread came out of the pot, everyone gathered around, eating while praising Old Yang.

Guest: The chicken soup from his family's chickens is especially oily and bright, and very fragrant, with a sweet aftertaste. It's because they grow for a long time. Actually, eating his family's chickens already feels very reassuring; besides that, we just come to have fun.

Guest: I just posted on Moments.

Hui Hui: You posted on Moments?

Guest: Yes, after posting on Moments the iron-pot chicken we ate, and the pot bread, the response was huge. Friends said, why didn't you tell me?

Now, Old Yang's base can sell more than 50,000 chickens and more than 1 million eggs each year, and the average price per chicken can reach 100 yuan. And Yang Hongqian also used 4 years to go from the low point of life with almost nothing to turning things around, with sales in 2016 reaching more than 6 million yuan.

Old Yang's business has achieved some success, but he says that behind this, one person is the greatest contributor, giving him tremendous support on the road of entrepreneurship. But this person, when they were in school, did not bully Old Yang any less.

Yang Hongqian: Back then we sat at the same desk. I always teased her. When I teased her, she got angry and hit me on the head with a book. Now I tell her, my brain doesn't work well now, and it's all from her hitting me with books back then.

Li Dan: When he made trouble, I hit him with a book.

Hui Hui: He says that sometimes his brain doesn't work well now because you hit him back then.

Li Dan: That's impossible. He's just older now, so his brain doesn't work well.

Teasing each other is the normal state of their life. Back then, after both graduated from university, they both worked in Qingdao, and went from friends to lovers.

At that time, Yang Hongqian worked as a tour guide and could earn more than 100,000 yuan a year. He bought a house and a car in Qingdao.

But in the year before they got married, one move by Old Yang completely overturned their lives. Even now, when mentioning the situation at that time, Li Dan and her mother still cannot control their emotions.

Li Dan: He chose such a hard path himself.

Mother: It was so bitter there. You don't know, the place he lived in was like a beggar's.

How did a good life suddenly turn into this? What did Yang Hongqian do back then?

One day in 2011, Old Yang helped a colleague take a tour group to Laoshan in Qingdao. After the guests ate stewed local chicken at a farmhouse in the mountains, they found it delicious and chewy, and saw that the free-range local chickens in the yard ate corn kernels and wheat bran, so they felt it was very natural and asked to buy some.

But when the owner named a price, even Yang Hongqian was surprised.

Yang Hongqian: The price set at that time was quite expensive, two or three hundred yuan per chicken. At that time, broiler chickens still dominated the market, selling for just five or six yuan, seven or eight yuan per jin. One chicken was about twenty or thirty yuan, while at that time that kind of free-range chicken was already selling for two or three hundred yuan each, meaning the price was very high, basically equivalent to ten times the market price of broiler chickens.

Despite the high price, the guests still bought all of the owner's more than a dozen chickens.

Old Yang grew up in the countryside since childhood. He had not expected that free-range local chickens could sell for such a high price. On the way back, he started thinking about making money.

Yang Hongqian: At that time, the breeding cost of that kind of free-range chicken would not exceed 100 yuan. The farmers in Laoshan all raised relatively few, thirty to fifty, one hundred, or eighty. I thought, if I expanded the scale of breeding and raised tens of thousands, I estimated that in a year there would be an income of several million, and it should be very easy.

After returning to the city, Old Yang discussed it with Li Dan, then rented 15 mu of land around Qingdao and raised 7,000 to 8,000 chickens. Every morning they let the chickens out, and at night drove them back.

From that time on, Old Yang discovered that these chickens especially loved to fight.

Fighting is very common, and I also really like watching them fight. When I have nothing to do, I take a little grain and throw it here for them, watching the chickens fight. It's quite fun.