Pigeon farmer Yang Xuehua stays true to her original aspiration and sings her dream aloud

Though she is a woman, she has the ambition of a man. With an unyielding fighting spirit, she rolled up her sleeves and carved out a world of her own. She boldly took the lead in starting a business, and while growing rich she did not forget her fellow villagers, practicing the core socialist values through her efforts to lead poverty alleviation, and earning widespread praise from society with her abundant positive energy. She is Yang Xuehua, a capable woman who became rich by raising pigeons in Renhua County and a deputy to the 14th Municipal People's Congress.

Forging ahead through hard work, turning her career into a splendid transformation

Yang Xuehua is a farmer through and through, but she is strong-willed and thoughtful. In 1997, when her company went bankrupt and she became a laid-off worker, she began doing some small business. At a class reunion, a classmate who had made a fortune raising pigeons suggested she raise pigeons. With her husband's strong support, she raised 30,000 yuan to bring in 150 pairs of pigeons. However, the road of entrepreneurship is always full of thorns and bumps. Because her technical management could not keep up and epidemic prevention measures were inadequate, the pigeons fell ill and died one after another, until the whole flock was wiped out. Facing this cruel reality, she fell into confusion and pain, and it was her husband's encouragement that made her regroup. In order to truly master breeding techniques, she did not hesitate to work as a volunteer at a pigeon farm, eating and sleeping in the crude, foul-smelling pigeon breeding facility, carefully observing and diligently studying the pigeons' habits every day.

The fragrance of plum blossoms comes from the bitter cold. She finally figured out a scientific breeding method. So she contracted more than 10 mu of mountain land, signed a 30-year contract, invested more than 2 million yuan, and established the Lianchuang White Pigeon Breeding Farmers' Professional Cooperative in Dongtang Town, Renhua County. Because she had mastered the core technology, her cooperative's breeding scale grew rapidly, expanding from the original 1,500 pairs to the current 20,000 pairs, achieving an annual income of more than 550,000 yuan, and she became a widely known capable woman who became rich through breeding. In recent years, she has been named a "Shaoguan March 8th Red Banner Pacesetter," a "Shaoguan Entrepreneurial Youth Demonstration Household," and a "Renhua County Women's Technical Expert." However, Yang Xuehua is not satisfied with this small goal she has achieved. She believes that in today's society, only by constantly learning and developing through innovation can one's career grow bigger and bigger. Therefore, whenever there is an opportunity for study and training, no matter how busy she is, she makes time to attend. She has successively participated in the SYB entrepreneurship training class at the Beijing "Rural Women" School organized by the county women's federation, the advanced training class for rural entrepreneurial youth in Guangdong Province at South China Agricultural University organized by the Guangdong Provincial Committee on the Care of the Next Generation, and the Guangdong Internet Plus Agriculture training class.

The new ways of thinking and new models she encountered in her studies and training, such as the Internet and agricultural supply-side reform, broadened her thinking even more, and she began to set her sights on another new world of modern agricultural development. In 2015, Yang Xuehua established Renhua County's first e-commerce platform, Xinnongren Ecological Agriculture Development Co., Ltd., built drying rooms and fresh-keeping warehouses, formed an integrated breeding-processing-sales "one-stop" industrial chain, and cooperated with "Hui Shenghuo" in the county town to provide delivery services for the agricultural products e-commerce platform. At present, through "online buying and selling," she has accumulated more than a thousand regular customers, and with the power of the Internet she has achieved a perfect transformation of a traditional industry.

Boldly taking responsibility, leading farming households onto a new path of targeted poverty alleviation

Yang Xuehua is a responsible and dependable person. Her wish is not only to become rich herself, but also to help more people get on the road to prosperity. "Being rich yourself doesn't count as being rich; only when everyone is well off is it truly good. As a farmers' representative, I should be a leader in poverty alleviation and lead farming households onto the road to prosperity," she always says. "For farmers with family difficulties, whether they develop breeding or planting, without a certain amount of capital and technical support, it is very difficult to escape poverty relying only on their own efforts. I am the leader of the cooperative, I have the ability, and even more so the responsibility, to help them change their poor and backward state." Yang Xuehua made up her mind to help more people develop breeding and planting businesses.

In order to let poor households have no worries, she tailored four poverty alleviation measures to different poor households according to their circumstances. First, for relatively poor farming households, she first provides breeding pigeons, and after the pigeons begin producing, she recovers the cost, which effectively solves a major problem for farming households unable to start businesses due to insufficient funds. Second, on the issue of pigeon sales, if farming households can sell the pigeons themselves, they sell them themselves; if they have not sold them all, she buys back all the remaining ones at the market price on time. Third, she provides technical support free of charge and without reservation. In addition to teaching the relevant main techniques on the spot, she also answers questions and gives careful guidance through WeChat, QQ, telephone and other means, resolving the farming households' worries. Fourth, she adopts a "company-base-farming household" business model to help farming households escape poverty. The company leases the farming households' land and, in addition to paying rent to poor households every year, also hires poor households to work at the company, giving them a fixed salary and solving the problem of poor households having no source of income.

Through these measures, Yang Xuehua successfully led 26 poor households onto the road to prosperity through breeding and planting, drove the development of the local breeding and planting industry, and explored a new path for targeted poverty alleviation among farming households.