Female pig farmer Guo Lian helps women get rich by raising pigs and shed poverty
Helping women get rich and shed poverty. Female "pig farmer" Guo Lian, inspired by the spirit of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation," joins countless young people with knowledge, skills and ability who are actively throwing themselves into the wave of entrepreneurship. Let Haidong become fertile ground for young people to realize their ambitions... Entrepreneurship is a personal choice, and even more a personal ideal. The reasons for starting a business are many and varied: to make money, to change one's life, to pursue a dream, to improve oneself... Whatever the original intention, one must understand what entrepreneurship requires...
One thought: returning to the countryside
The entrepreneurial story we will tell today is about Guo Lian, a female "pig farmer" from Wanzi Village, Sanhe Town, Haidong City. Over 10 years she turned learning into a habit and pig farming into a career, restoring the villagers' confidence in getting rich by raising pigs, leading women from other villages to develop the breeding industry, and driving women to get rich through science and technology. Guo Lian completed a brilliant turnaround from the sales industry to the breeding industry!
Wanzi Village is located in Sanhe Town, Haidong City, at an altitude of 2300 m. In the deep mountains of Wanzi Village, Guo Lian keeps watch as a professional pig farmer. Over 10 years she built a 10,000-head ecological pig farm, with a market reaching Qinghai, Gansu and other places.
In April 2008, Guo Lian came alone to Wanzi Village. On her second day in the village she selected a 3-mu plot of farmland, negotiated its requisition with the villagers, and began building her first pig farm, setting up the Liansheng Pig Breeding Professional Cooperative. Faced with such a fair-skinned, frail-looking city woman, the villagers were mostly worried and doubtful. But this would be a new starting point for her to develop ecological breeding.
Before the age of 30, Guo Lian had never imagined that one day she would return to the deep mountains of her hometown to be a "pig farmer." If she had continued in the sales industry she knew so well, she might have become a successful businesswoman.
Guo Lian is a woman born in the 1980s. After marrying in 2002, she quit her stable job to make it easier to care for her family. In those days she set up a street stall, worked the night market, and ran a steamed bun shop. In 2006 she owned a supermarket of more than 90 sq m, and in less than a year she earned her first 100,000 yuan.
One time at the end of 2007, after watching the news broadcast, her husband jokingly said without thinking: "Honey, look how much the state cares about agriculture, rural areas and farmers now. The market for agriculture, rural areas and farmers has good prospects. If there's a chance, let's go back to our hometown and develop farming and animal husbandry!" He said it casually, but it stirred ripples in her heart. That Spring Festival, when she went home to visit relatives, she quietly surveyed the local geographical conditions and the target customers, and finally set her goal on pig breeding.
In April 2008 she called a family meeting and laid out her plan to return to Wanzi Village, Sanhe Town, Ping'an, to raise pigs. The whole family was astonished, and not one of them supported her. With her current abilities, she could live more than comfortably in Ping'an, so why go to the countryside to raise pigs?
While persuading her family, she hurried to build the pig farm. In November 2008 her first pig farm was completed and she began bringing in pigs to operate. But how could the road of entrepreneurship be so smooth?
Losing money while growing
Because it was winter and the weather was cold, and she lacked breeding experience, the sows fell ill one after another after farrowing, and the piglets kept having problems due to the low temperature in the pens. This situation caught her completely off guard. Although she tried every way to consult experienced breeders, sought out livestock veterinarians everywhere, and looked up information, that first lunar January more than 100 of her weaned piglets still died.
In the mornings she did not dare push open the door of the pens, and once inside she did not dare look. At first, when she buried the dead piglets deep in the ground on her back, she would cry, feeling utterly helpless. But gradually she understood that crying and despair could not change anything. Strong-willed, she wiped away her tears: for every piglet that died, she dissected one, recorded one, and asked someone for advice about one. Through this blood and tears she accumulated valuable experience. Faced with the villagers' lack of understanding, she never explained and never shed a tear. By then her family could no longer sit still and urged her to give up, but with sheer stubbornness she insisted on seeing it through to the end. She told her husband: "No matter what kind of life you choose, you can't be frightened off by a setback like this." Afterward she again summed up the causes of failure and worked hard to learn breeding techniques. Through half a year of effort, her sow inventory exceeded 80 head, piglet breeding reached 500 head, and she also sent more than 200 fattening pigs to market, achieving an economic profit.
Shedding poverty for those in difficulty
Once her own pigs were raised well, the next problem to solve was how to drive other women to develop the breeding industry and help women get rich through science and technology. If she could build a large pig farm to lead villagers to get rich by raising pigs, it would be a good deed benefiting both others and herself. Guo Lian was confident she could complete a brilliant turnaround from retail to breeding.
After investigating elsewhere, conducting field surveys, and thinking it over carefully, she decided to adopt the business model of cooperative + breeding base + farmers, mobilizing women far and wide to join the cooperative. She also invited experts to hold breeding technology training classes, and went to farmers' homes to teach women breeding techniques hand in hand, encouraging them to develop the breeding industry and get rich. She provided breeding techniques free of charge to cooperative members in difficulty, gave them piglets, built pig pens, and supplied feed on credit. Through her efforts she led and drove rural women across the surrounding area to develop breeding and get rich, playing the exemplary role of a grassroots Party member in the "double study and double compare" campaign. The cooperative's members grew from 29 households at the beginning to 90 households. When people talk about her, no one fails to give a thumbs-up; everyone is willing to work with such an enterprising, down-to-earth and trustworthy person.
After half a year of surveying and site selection, in April 2012 construction began in Xinzhuang Village, Sanhe Town, on a new breeding farm covering 96 mu, with an investment of 10 million yuan and pig pen area of more than 10,000 sq m. After intense construction, by November 2012 the pig farm was put into production. Now, the sows in the farm sleep on farrowing crates, the fattening pigs sleep on fermentation beds, the nursery pens have nursery beds, and artificial insemination technology is used for breeding. She wanted to take the path of scientific breeding. Indeed, her breeding farm was rated a "standardized breeding community" by the state.
At present, she has already negotiated with farmers in selenium-rich soil areas around the breeding farm to grow selenium-rich feed through "farmer + cooperative" contract planting. The cooperative purchases the farmers' feed according to contract, then processes it uniformly. When the pigs eat selenium-rich feed, they naturally absorb selenium, ultimately producing healthy selenium-rich pork. The development of selenium-rich pork will drive about 120 planting households and more than 100 breeding households onto the path of high-yield, high-value-added deep-processing agriculture.