Qianjiang's Wei Chenglin's Guide to Wealth: From Pond to Field

Recently, a brand-new small pickup truck parked in front of the home of Wei Chenglin, a science and technology demonstration household in Longwan Town, drawing neighbors over to see the excitement. Wei Chenglin said with a laugh that the shrimp harvest season was about to begin, and he bought the pickup to make it easier to transport shrimp from his contracted base in Zhangjin.

Wei Chenglin told reporters that in addition to 60 mu of shrimp-rice paddies in Huangqiao Village, he contracted another 270 mu of land in Zhangjin Town in the second half of 2013, bringing his total shrimp-rice co-cropping area to 330 mu and his annual net income to over one million yuan.

An Unplanned Discovery: Spotting an Opportunity While Fishing and Catching Shrimp

Wei Chenglin is from Group 2 of Huangqiao Village, Longwan Town. Because his family had many people and little land, they scraped by on just over 10 mu of poor fields, living hand to mouth. To change his family's situation, around 2000 Wei Chenglin built a chicken farm and a pig farm one after another. At the same time, he often went down to the river to fish to supplement the household income. It was this occasional fishing that led the quick-witted Wei Chenglin to discover a potential market and changed the life of this ordinary farmer.

It turned out that when Wei Chenglin fished, he often caught crayfish of various sizes. At the time, large crayfish sold for three or four yuan per jin, while small ones sold for only three jiao. He calculated that his family had a one-mu fish pond, and if he put the small shrimp he caught into the pond, raised them to full size and then sold them, they would be worth much more.

So, starting in the early summer of 2004, he put the small shrimp he caught into the fish pond and sold them that same year. The crayfish actually sold for more than 2,000 yuan, which was no small income at the time. This unplanned move spurred his drive to focus on shrimp farming. When he learned that rice-field shrimp farming was booming in Jiyukou Town, he made a special trip to seek advice. After returning to Huangqiao Village, he completely shut down his pig farm, used 60 mu of cold-waterlogged fields exchanged with fellow villagers for his own contracted land, carried out renovations, and began growing rice and farming shrimp. All the shrimp fry he stocked were caught by himself from ditches and canals. That year, Wei Chenglin earned nearly 100,000 yuan from selling rice and crayfish.

The next year, when neighbors saw him frequently hauling shrimp out on his motorcycle and always coming back with over a thousand yuan in hand, easily earning a hundred thousand yuan a year, they realized that farming alone would never make them rich. Even villagers like Li Dejin and Huang Dong, who had once scorned shrimp farming, came knocking to ask for advice.

Today, all 43 households in Group 2 of Huangqiao Village have dug shrimp ponds for rice-field shrimp farming, and villagers in nearby Zhuchang Village, Dongqingyuan Village, Xiongkou Town and other villages have followed suit one after another. According to Wei Chenglin's rough estimate, there are now more than 150 rice-field shrimp farming households around Huangqiao Village.

A Far-Sighted Vision: Scientific Farming and Breeding Double the Returns

Although Wei Chenglin only has a junior high school education, he is eager to learn and skilled at studying new technologies. After years of hard work and experience, he mastered a complete set of mature rice-field shrimp farming techniques. Every time the city organized training on crayfish farming techniques or new professional farmer cultivation, he never missed a single one. Through participating in training, he broadened his horizons and deeply felt that "science and technology are productivity."

While attending a crayfish farming study tour organized by the city's agriculture department, Wei Chenglin discovered that his own crayfish yield was about 200 jin per mu, while some farmers reached 400 jin per mu. After visiting and asking around, he found that the high-yield farmers had adopted the new "shrimp-rice co-cropping" technique, while he was still stuck in the old "shrimp-rice rotation" model. After returning, he quickly upgraded his 60 mu of shrimp-rice paddies to adopt "shrimp-rice co-cropping," raising his crayfish yield to 400 jin per mu.

Wei Chenglin did the math: his crayfish output that year reached 24,000 jin, with sales revenue of 312,000 yuan. The output value per mu was 5,200 yuan, with a net income of 240,000 yuan and an average net income of 4,000 yuan per mu.

In addition to working hard on farming techniques, Wei Chenglin also put his mind to cutting expenses. To reduce costs, he mixed his own shrimp feed. The animal-based feed he initially used for feeding crayfish included snails, mussels and relatively cheap silver carp and wild trash fish. He got the idea when he found someone using pig lungs to process and farm snakehead fish. So starting in 2013, during the off-season he went to the Shuanghui company in Henan to purchase pig lungs, rented cold storage in the Xiongkou management district to store and process them, and used pig lungs as animal-based bait to feed crayfish. This alone saved nearly 20,000 yuan in feed expenses.

Noble Character: Leading Fellow Villagers onto the Road to Prosperity

In recent years, Wei Chenglin had been troubled by the need to expand his farming scale. In the early summer of 2013, Wei Chenglin met Deng Yemao of Group 10, Liutinghe Village, Zhangjin Town. Deng Yemao told him that he still had several hundred mu of idle fish ponds in his hometown in Zhangjin that he could rent to him, and the two hit it off immediately. Wei Chenglin signed a 5-year contract with Deng Yemao and rented 270 mu of fish ponds.

Wei Chenglin hired 3 local villagers to focus on farming shrimp and growing rice for him, while he himself devoted his main energy to technical guidance and sales.

At the end of 2013, Wei Chenglin learned that someone in Dongqingyuan Village had begun exploring an intensive crayfish farming model. This type of farming does not grow rice; instead, hot-water grass is planted in the shrimp ponds, which can delay the crayfish market time to November, cleverly exploiting the time gap to make more money, with the highest net income per mu reaching over 6,000 yuan. After returning from learning the technique, he renovated 90 mu of shrimp ponds and began intensive shrimp farming experiments, while the remaining 180 mu continued shrimp-rice co-cropping. In 2014, he harvested over 300,000 jin of rice, earning 400,000 yuan from rice alone. Adding the crayfish income, his net income that year approached one million yuan.

One person grows rich, and drives a whole area forward. Wei Chenglin became wealthy, but he did not forget his fellow villagers, and he taught without reservation those who came to him for technical help. Under his leadership, Huangqiao Village and the surrounding area quickly set off a shrimp farming boom. In 2011, Huangqiao Village established a crayfish farming professional cooperative, with Wei Chenglin as its director. He enthusiastically helped members coordinate and solve crayfish fry supply nearby, organized members to exchange farming techniques with one another, and centralized the sale of commercial shrimp, all of it free of charge. The crayfish industry has become the pillar industry for increasing income and achieving prosperity for Wei Chenglin and the villagers of Huangqiao. Many people escaped poverty because of it. Huang Anping, a villager from Group 2 of Huangqiao Village, whose family was once utterly destitute, completely changed his impoverished situation after following Wei Chenglin in shrimp farming for several years.

After Wei Chenglin went to Zhangjin Town to farm shrimp, he also drove more than 20 local households to take up shrimp farming. For this, after receiving the honor of "Science and Technology Demonstration Household of the National Agricultural Technology Promotion Demonstration County" issued by the provincial Department of Agriculture, in February 2014 he received the title of "2013 Top Ten Science and Technology Demonstration Households" jointly issued by the Municipal Party Committee Office and the Municipal Government Office. At the end of that year, he was again awarded the glorious title of "2013 Agricultural Science and Technology Promotion Science and Technology Demonstration Household" by the provincial Department of Agriculture.

Last year, Wei Chenglin expanded the intensive shrimp farming area at his Zhangjin Town crayfish farming base, making intensive shrimp farming and rice-field shrimp farming equal in scale. At the end of the year, he did the math and found his net income had reached 1.2 million yuan. Recently, he invested 700,000 yuan to buy two storefront rooms in the Jinjiang Xingcheng residential community in Yuanlin urban area to set up a transfer station, preparing to push the cooperative members' crayfish into the national market in bulk.