Snowball-style farming helps farmers get rich

Many years ago, 45-year-old young farmer Li Hai of Fodianwan Village, Tuqiao Township, Qingcheng County, watched as young people in the surrounding countryside all went out to work and earn money, build wealth and strive for a decent life. He saw it with his own eyes and felt anxious at heart. Because he had two elderly parents above him and two children below him who had to be taken to and picked up from junior high school every week, he could not leave home for the time being. So he planned to take up farming at home, secretly resolved to compete with the brothers who had gone out to work, and refused to believe that a grown man had no chance to make good at home. He then began to calculate: taking advantage of living in a mountainous area with vast land and a good climate, he and his father discussed it and planted more than 30 mu of alfalfa, starting a small-scale farming business with little investment and quick returns in a "snowball" model.

Once he had the idea, he had to act. In 2013, he improved and bred his own two native yellow cattle into Zaosheng brown-red cattle, mainly raising cows to calve, so they could both plow the land for farming and increase the value of quality calves. The market price of one calf was also around four to five thousand yuan. At present, apart from the dozens sold, he still raises 6 pure-colored Zaosheng cattle of different sizes, fat and strong. He also improved and replaced the hundred or so native sheep his father had previously grazed. He had gone many times to cashmere goat bases in Ningxia, **, Huanxian and other places for inspections, and bought back breeding male cashmere goats for crossbreeding. After several years of crossbreeding and improvement, all of them have now been bred into more than 100 crossbred cashmere goats (excluding the sheep sold each year). Each year they can still produce about sixty to seventy-plus kilograms of high-quality cashmere and around 60 lambs; his wife was no slouch either. Besides helping her husband farm forty to fifty mu of contracted land, she also had him buy back dozens of native black-bone chickens from other places. Through hatching and breeding in recent years, raising chicks and selling roosters, they produced on average about 2,000 native black-bone chicken eggs per year. They bought an incubator, and the free-range native black-bone chickens were raised without adding any chemical feed, about two-thirds higher than similar native chickens and native eggs. And they were all sold online to other places and cities, greatly admired and envied by the local people.

Clever Li Hai, through these years of small-scale "snowball" development, strengthened his own poultry and livestock, and his annual economic income was also very considerable. From then on, Li Hai's father, over sixty years old, also straightened his back, his sickly mother also had laughter and a say, and the children's school fees were no problem either. It truly matched the saying: if the family is harmonious, all undertakings prosper, and yellow earth turns into gold. For many years he had done both farming and breeding at home without neglecting either, supporting the old and carrying the young, with family harmony. The whole family, old and young, thought in one direction and worked with one effort, twisting into one rope. Wholeheartedly seeking development, family farming required little investment and brought good returns; it saved worry and effort, and did not earn less than those working outside. During the interview, Li Hai said happily with a smile: "No matter what a person does, first, he must fix his eyes on the goal; second, he must have faith and perseverance. My family's 'snowball' style small-scale farming model has, in recent years, pushed me from a small helper to the position of 'general manager'."