Pheasant Farming Helps Ma Xinghui onto the Road to Prosperity

Shuicaoba Village in Sanheba Township, where Ma Xinghui lives, is one of the most remote villages in the township, with high mountains and dense forests, sparse population, and few ways for people to earn income; going out to work as a migrant laborer has always been the first choice for the young and strong labor force here. Ma Xinghui was one of them. But while others were still spending all year drifting from place to place far from home earning money by sheer physical labor, Ma Xinghui came back and started a breeding farm at home. In just one year, he made the people of seven villages along the river look at him with new respect and give him a thumbs-up.

Because his family was poor, after graduating from junior middle school, Ma Xinghui went with others to work in Anhui, Jiangxi, Wuxi and other places. While working at a construction site somewhere in Anhui, he happened to discover that a type of pheasant raised at a local farm sold very well, and that the natural environment of that place was similar to that of Kang County. He also learned that the feed for raising this kind of pheasant was wheat, corn and the like, which Kang County also had. Ma Xinghui kept this in mind; whenever he had free time, he would go to that chicken farm, chat with the owner, and learn the relevant techniques for raising pheasants. Once he had basically mastered the essentials of pheasant farming, Ma Xinghui quit his job at the construction site, returned to Kang County, and began planning with his family to start his own pheasant farm.

Ma Xinghui's family originally lived on a hillside five or six hundred meters from the highway; the new house has now been built by the roadside, and the barren slope and abandoned land below the front of the old house amount to seven or eight mu, just right for free-range pheasant raising. After some preparation, in March 2016, Ma Xinghui registered and established the Xianghui Farmers' Professional Cooperative, absorbing 13 farming households into the cooperative. He invested 130,000 yuan to build simple chicken sheds of 100 sq m. Because the climate and environment needed for pheasant growth were exceptionally favorable, by the end of the year more than 1,000 pheasants were ready for market; each pheasant chick was bought for 20 yuan and sold for 90 yuan, yielding a profit of more than 60 yuan per bird.

Since the pheasant farm was built, Ma Xinghui has spent most of his time in the chicken farm. During the day he feeds them on schedule, and at night he leafs through the breeding "secret manuals" borrowed from the village library. Whenever there is a problem, he consults experts at the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau of He County, Anhui, by phone or WeChat.

Among the members who joined the cooperative, 9 are poor households in the village. Every time Ma Xinghui buys back chicks, the first thing he does is deliver chicks to them, and when the birds are ready for market, he goes to their homes to collect and pay for them. Last year Han Fengjun earned more than 2,000 yuan just from raising the pheasants provided by the cooperative.

This year, Ma Xinghui also plans to raise Yangba's Taiping chickens, expand the chicken farm area and breeding scale, and at the same time attract more farming households to join the cooperative, and also get the beekeeping industry going, so that the people around him can truly embark on the road out of poverty to prosperity.