Post-90s Veteran Raises Cattle and Sells Beef, Blazing a New Path in Poverty Alleviation

In December 2012, after post-90s young man Li Yuan was discharged from the military and returned to Chenzhou City, Hunan Province, he did not choose to have the government arrange a job for him and become a stable "office worker." Instead, he went deep into the mountains and became a "cowherd." "My idea at the time was very simple: just do something down-to-earth. Farming is simple and pure. As long as you are diligent and solid, you will reap rewards." Li Yuan believed that beef prices were relatively stable, that there were not many local cattle in Chenzhou, and that there was considerable room for development in beef cattle farming. In September 2013, Li Yuan borrowed money and came to Yongchun Township in Beihu District to lease land and set up his first cattle farm. "After deciding to raise cattle, I first went to work as a short-term laborer at someone else's cattle farm for a while. Later I invited the local 'master' cattle raisers, and we all learned while doing. That's how the cattle farm opened for business."

In order to improve the quality of the beef cattle, Li Yuan thought about it all day long, asked for advice everywhere, and came up with a trendy method of giving the cattle beer to drink and music to listen to. He believed this had a scientific basis: giving cattle a proper amount of beer can increase their appetite, making the meat more tender and fresher, while playing music for two or three hours at fixed times each day would make the cattle happy and promote digestion. When the cattle got sick, Li Yuan would hold a medicine bottle and drench each cow one by one with medicine, and being kicked by the cattle was a common occurrence. In order to care for sick cattle, during that period he ate and slept at the cattle farm.

In order to solve the technical problems well, Li Yuan often sought technical support from animal husbandry and fisheries departments at the provincial, city and county levels, and began to build his own team of technicians. They introduced American Hong Angus beef cattle and crossbred them with local Xiangnan yellow cattle to improve a new generation of breeds with superior meat quality. In order to let people know that his beef was good beef, Li Yuan and Yuan Jianghe, who was also born in the 1990s, opened a beef experience store - the "Tianhu Niu Ge" dining experience store, which has now become a well-known local dining brand.

In November 2015, Li Yuan participated in the "First Chenzhou Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition" held by the Chenzhou Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League and fought his way all the way into the finals. He got to know many entrepreneurial partners, obtained "angel investment" provided by the Chenzhou Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League, and the guidance of the youth entrepreneurship mentor team helped him clarify his development ideas.

Ouyang He, a villager from Xiaotian Village, Chonglingjiang Town, Guiyang County, raised 28 cattle and invested more than 100,000 yuan, but when the cattle grew up they could not be sold, and the family's finances became increasingly tight. After hearing about this, Li Yuan rushed to Guiyang County and bought 10 cattle on the spot, and suggested that the other party wait until the price was better at the end of the year and then sell the remaining cattle to him. After several years of hard struggle, Li Yuan saw the possibility of integrating his entrepreneurial dream into the targeted poverty alleviation strategy. On the basis of sending warmth to disadvantaged people around the farm over the years, Li Yuan began to "bind" enterprise development together with the poverty alleviation of poor households.

Furong Village, Yangtianhu Yao Township, Beihu District, has a relatively large poor population because it is located in a mountainous area with inconvenient transportation. In addition to providing jobs, Li Yuan also decided to use the ranch as collateral to provide loans to local poor villagers for cattle herding, implementing industrial poverty alleviation through a model in which the ranch raises cattle on their behalf with profit guarantees and buys back cattle at high prices from villagers who raise them themselves.

"This time my credit rating is pretty good, so I can receive 30,000 yuan in poverty alleviation funds. When the cattle farm distributes profits next year, I can get at least 4,500 yuan in profit." Xiao Liangyin, a villager from Furong Village, Yangtianhu Yao Township, Beihu District, said happily.

The enterprise puts up the money to buy cattle, farming households are responsible for herding the cattle, and the enterprise then sells the beef to the market through sales channels, after which everyone waits for the profit distribution the following year. Even if there is no profit, the enterprise still bears, according to the agreement, a minimum interest guarantee of 10% to 15% for loan-taking farming households. With this guarantee, the enthusiasm of farming households was mobilized, and a total of about 2 million yuan in financial poverty alleviation loans was invested in the ranch.

This year, Li Yuan repeated the same approach in Qingzhu Village, Guidong County, and on the basis of past practices adopted a model of "rotating employment" of poor households at the cattle farm. In this way, on the one hand it can help more poor households increase their labor income, and on the other hand it can also popularize cattle-raising techniques among poor households. Luo Guiquan, a poor household in Qingzhu Village, Guidong County, used to do odd jobs everywhere and could only earn a few thousand yuan a year. Now he works at the cattle farm and earns about 30,000 yuan a year. At present, this project has also absorbed 50 poor households from Qingzhu Village into the cooperative cattle-raising model.

Feeling that sales channels for agricultural products were not smooth, Li Yuan decided to build his own e-commerce platform. On September 28 this year, a public account message titled "The cattle are here!" announced the official opening of his e-commerce sales platform: beef slaughtered at 3 a.m. every morning was sold online at a low price of 35 yuan per jin, and this high-quality beef all came from the 4 cattle farms he had set up himself.

Now, Li Yuan has 1 distribution center, 2 dining experience stores and 4 direct-sale beef stores. The high-quality yellow beef sold on the e-commerce platform is even cheaper than ordinary beef outside, and while selling beef, they also focus on promoting various agricultural and sideline products from poor villages. Li Yuan is full of confidence in the prospects of the e-commerce platform: "It can be said that now every time everyone buys a jin of beef, every time they buy any agricultural product, it is equivalent to contributing to poverty alleviation once."