The "Wealth-Building Secrets" of Old Xue, a Pig-Farming Expert in Gulang County, Wuwei

Old Xue's pig farm is located in Haizitan Town, Gulang County. When it comes to the secrets of pig farming, Old Xue talks nonstop, and no one can get a word in. He says that 2016 was the best year for pig-farming profits, but unfortunately there were too few sows and piglets.

Two rows of pig sheds, more than fifty in total, are lined up in a single row running east to west. In the middle of each row of pig sheds, there is a simple storage room. To ensure the normal growth of the pigs, the open side of the pig sheds is covered with thick plastic, which lets light through and also keeps them warm. In each pen of the pig sheds there are seven or eight pigs, with boars, sows, large pigs, and small pigs fed in separate pens. As soon as a stranger comes in, the piglets drinking from the automatic water nipples scatter in all directions. The large pigs, however, are clearly already used to it: those lying down keep lying down, and those strolling keep strolling. When Old Xue enters the pigpen, he touches this pig and pats that pig, and the pigs do not mind at all. One pig nuzzles his trouser leg with its snout, another bites at the edge of his jacket, and after spending so much time day and night with these pigs, his work clothes have become “bright armor and shining helmet”. Seven or eight sows each live in their own pen; some sows are nursing piglets, lying there and letting the piglets climb up and down, crowding one another as they suckle milk. Old Xue explains that piglets are generally raised by their mother for about one month, and then mother and young must part, setting off on the road to “fattening”.

Old Xue and his wife are both past sixty years of age, and to feed more than 100 pigs, just crushing feed every day is a big project. To reduce labor intensity, he bought some equipment, and even more of the equipment and facilities he designed and installed entirely by himself. Old Xue set the floor of the pig sheds to slope outward, so that all the waste is swept out of the pens into a connected small ditch, and an electric scraper pushes it forward in parallel from both ends toward the middle, gathering the waste in the small ditch together; then a water pump sends it through a hidden pipe to a landfill pool more than 100 m away, where after fermentation it becomes top-quality farmyard manure. He installed electronic surveillance himself, so that from the corner of the room by his bed he can keep an eye on conditions in the pig sheds at any time. Especially at critical moments such as when sows give birth, the surveillance truly played a huge role and provided great convenience. He also modified the crusher so that various feeds are formed in one pass in the proper proportions.

Through ten springs, summers, autumns, and winters, Old Xue relied on his own two hands and his wisdom to build this modern pig farm, with annual net income of no less than seventy or eighty thousand yuan.