Pig farming set Xu Changqing on the road to prosperity

Xu Changqing of Zhangtaisi Village, Nanzhai Town, Huixian City, is the village's well-known pig-farming expert. With his own pig-raising skills, he has given his whole family a good life.

Xu Changqing, 43 this year, has one brother. When he was a child, the family was poor, so he stopped going to school after finishing junior high and went home to farm with his parents. After getting married, Xu Changqing and his wife, dissatisfied with their life at the time, decided to buy a few pigs to raise at home and sell them at a good price around the New Year. "At that time, apart from farming, the only option we had to escape poverty was livestock breeding, because there wasn't a single enterprise in the whole village," Xu Changqing said.

Everything is hard at the beginning. In the earliest days, Xu Changqing and his wife bought 4 sows and built a pigpen in their own yard. "At that time, my wife and I didn't know the first thing about raising pigs; when we had nothing else to do, we would go to the homes of villagers who had raised pigs to learn from their experience," Xu Changqing said. "The first year of pig farming brought no profit. By the second year, we had earned twenty or thirty thousand yuan, and we were overjoyed."

"Raising pigs looks simple, but it's actually very hard," Xu Changqing said. To raise the pigs well, he and his wife had to get up at 6 a.m. every day to feed the pigs, and then clean the pigpen thoroughly. At noon, in the afternoon and in the evening, the pigs had to be fed again. In summer, because of the high temperatures, he installed an exhaust fan in the pigpen to blow the hot air out and keep the pigs from suffering heatstroke. In winter, he would light a charcoal stove in the pigpen to keep the temperature up and prevent the pigs from catching cold. On top of that, the pigs had to be vaccinated regularly.

If you want to do something well, you need patience. Xu Changqing said that a few years ago, many villagers thought pig farming could earn a lot of money, so more and more of them took it up. But unexpectedly, the market happened to be poor in those years, and many villagers gave up after losing money. Considering that he had some experience and sales channels, he decided not to give up. Later, as the market recovered, his family earned more and more money from pig farming each year. Now, Xu Changqing's pig operation is bigger and bigger, from the original 4 sows to the current 20 sows and 160 fattening pigs, and the small pigpen has become two large pigpens.

"Now we've rebuilt our house and even bought a car. It's tiring work, but every time I think about how our whole family's life will keep getting better, I feel very content and very happy," Xu Changqing said.

Speaking of his plans for the future, Xu Changqing said: "I plan to expand my pigpens even more, try to earn more money, and make life better for the whole family."