Raising pigs and growing fruit brings double income, Guizhou daughter-in-law leads Pingguo villagers onto the road to prosperity
In Mingjiang Village, Sitang Town, Pingguo County, when people talk about He Hongfen, the village committee director, everyone knows her. In 2009, He Hongfen and her husband started a pig farm, and now she has also contracted land to start growing citrus fruits. Relying on scientific citrus growing and pig raising techniques, she has led the villagers onto an ever-wider road to prosperity.
College graduate returns home to raise pigs
He Hongfen, a young woman from Guizhou, graduated from Hunan Agricultural University in 2007 with a major in animal medicine, and then worked for a year at Guangxi State Farms Jinguang Company, where she met her husband, who studied animal husbandry and veterinary medicine. In 2009, He Hongfen decided to return to her husband's hometown - Nadeng Tun, Mingjiang Village, Sitang Town, Pingguo County - to start a pig farm. At the time they were full of confidence, feeling that since both husband and wife had studied animal husbandry, they had both theoretical knowledge and practical experience: "We've managed ten thousand pigs, so can't we handle a few hundred?"
At first, the people around them did not understand at all. "A university graduate should find a stable and respectable job in the city, honestly go to work as a white-collar worker. Going back to the village to raise pigs, isn't that the same as wasting all those years of study?" Her husband's family all thought so. After the villagers learned of their idea to raise pigs, they all cast strange looks and shook their heads one after another, which made the couple feel tremendous pressure from the outside world.
He Hongfen and her husband began their pig-raising business under pressure. Since they started running their own pig farm, apart from going home to eat, they had hardly stepped out of the pig farm's gate. "With your own pig farm, you need to do everything thoroughly, not just do one job well," He Hongfen said. After starting to raise pigs, they lived in a crude little room at the pig farm. Apart from a double bed and simple toiletries, there was nothing in the room. At the beginning, due to limited funds, they scraped together only around ten thousand yuan after borrowing from relatives and friends. The pig farm was small, with only 6 sows. Today, He Hongfen's pig farm has grown to 70 sows, with an annual output of 1,600 commercial pigs, sold through pig-raising QQ groups and WeChat to surrounding townships, as well as Nanning, Fangchenggang, Chongzuo and other places.
Although pig raising achieved great success, He Hongfen also suffered an unexpected major blow. From 2013 to 2014, pork prices fell to a historic low, with the price of live pigs dropping to as low as 5 yuan per jin, while feed remained very expensive, which meant selling pigs meant losing money. After calm analysis, He Hongfen believed that this ultra-low live pig price was nearing the bottom and would likely rebound before 2015. They should take advantage of this period of market downturn to upgrade and breed new varieties in order to catch the future market.
He Hongfen's "recuperate and build up strength" plan also won her husband's support, and the couple began raising funds to focus on breeding Large Three-Way commercial pigs. Finally, in 2015, the live pig market began to recover, and the price of live pigs also rose back to 8 yuan/jin. Because He Hongfen's pigs were Large Three-Way commercial pigs with good breeds, their selling price was higher than that of other breeds, which let them taste sweet success. After that, they continued to invest funds in developing the pig-raising business, and the scale of the pig farm continued to expand accordingly, while the couple's wallets slowly bulged.
The "self-taught expert" forced out by circumstances
He Hongfen brought tangible economic benefits to the village, and the villagers all saw it clearly and felt grateful to her. From 2011 to 2014, she was successively elected as women's director, deputy director, and director of the Mingjiang Village Villagers' Committee. The bigger the official position, the heavier the burden on her shoulders. As the village's leader, He Hongfen keenly realized: if the villagers are to truly become rich, pig raising alone will not do. At that time, many people in the village had also become rich by growing grapes, and selling grapes was one of the villagers' main sources of income. However, because grapevines have many roots, after many years of planting the varieties had aged seriously and fruit quality was poor, so both yield and selling price could not rise, and the villagers' income did not increase noticeably.
In 2015, through investigation, He Hongfen found that growing citrus fruits was an effective way to increase farmers' income, so she proposed to the village committee team that the villagers be mobilized to grow citrus fruits. Although everyone thought this was a good way to increase income, after all no one in the village had ever grown citrus on a large scale, so no one dared to plant first. In order to play a leading and demonstrative role, He Hongfen bought more than 800 fruit tree seedlings and contracted 21 mu of land to begin combining planting and breeding. As the saying goes: different trades are like different mountains. After all, growing fruit was not He Hongfen's specialty and was clearly different from raising pigs. He Hongfen had no choice but to take the lead in learning the theoretical knowledge of fruit tree cultivation herself, while also leading villagers to visit nearby villages and hamlets that grew fruit, and even paying out of her own pocket to go to Wuming District, Nanning to "learn from experience" and study advanced fruit tree cultivation techniques. Through self-imposed pressure and hard study, the clever He Hongfen has now become a "self-taught expert" in fruit tree cultivation, having proficiently mastered the techniques and methods of fruit tree planting. When villagers encounter difficulties in growing fruit trees, they all like to consult her. Under her leadership, Mingjiang Village currently grows more than 800 mu of citrus fruits. In order to eliminate the fruit growers' worries, He Hongfen often accompanies fruit growers to other places to transport high-quality fruit seedlings, and uses her acquaintances to provide high-quality fruit seedlings to fruit growers at preferential prices. If some fruit growers lack the start-up capital to grow fruit, He Hongfen also guarantees loans for them.
The "easy to talk to" female director
As village committee director, He Hongfen has endless things to do every day, which leaves her less and less time at home. She is even so busy that she often forgets to breastfeed her daughter, who is only a few months old, and only stops what she is doing to hurriedly feed her daughter a few mouthfuls after the baby cries loudly from hunger. The villagers all praise He Hongfen as "easy to talk to." Whichever villager encounters difficulties, as soon as they call He Hongfen, she immediately goes to help solve it. Once, a left-behind elderly person in the village wanted to go to the bank to open an account and deposit money, but could not write, so they went to the pig farm to find He Hongfen. Busy feeding the pigs, she immediately stopped her work and carefully filled out the relevant materials for the elderly person. Growing fruit trees requires manure water, so He Hongfen let villagers carry it from her own pig farm's manure pit, never charging a single cent, and also provided the pig farm's biogas residue and biogas slurry free of charge to fruit growers, benefiting more than 300 mu. He Hongfen believes that for the village to develop, the village committee team must first be united. For this reason, He Hongfen pays close attention to maintaining good relations with village officials and strengthening the village committee's cohesion. Under He Hongfen's leadership, the village officials have been bound together as one, doing their utmost to solve difficulties for the villagers and winning the villagers' trust. "My relationship with the villagers is like that of brothers and sisters," He Hongfen said. These achievements she has made are all the result of everyone's joint efforts.
Leading villagers to become rich together
When the villagers saw that He Hongfen and her husband had become rich by raising pigs, they all asked them for pig-raising experience and also wanted to become rich through pig raising. He Hongfen was not afraid of competition from peers and unreservedly provided them with technical support for epidemic prevention, feed, and breeding, and also provided them with fine breeding pigs, feed formulas, and modern pig-raising management techniques. Disease prevention was what He Hongfen cared about most. Once signs of an epidemic were discovered, she not only carried out epidemic prevention well at her own pig farm, but also notified other pig-raising households in the village and told them which vaccine to use and when to inoculate.
Under He Hongfen's careful guidance and care, Mingjiang Village's pig-raising industry developed rapidly, and dozens of large-scale pig-raising households emerged. Zhang Biaoxiang of Tuosha Tun now has an annual output of 800 commercial pigs, and Huang Dingjian of Nading Tun has an annual output of 600 commercial pigs. Some poor households in the village, because they had little capital, raised only sows and made money specifically by selling piglets, also achieving good economic benefits, and some even escaped poverty because of it, with their living standards steadily improving.