Cattle Farming Specialist Ma Wenyi Leads Villagers Toward Moderate Prosperity

Villagers are making silage from corn stalks, a major breakthrough in the village's cattle-raising technique

Ma Wenyi, a 37-year-old villager from Xieling, heard the Party's publicity about industry-based poverty alleviation policies in the early days of the targeted poverty alleviation work. Seeing the families around him grow prosperous one by one, and then looking at his own modest living conditions, he felt as if he had swallowed an unripe fruit, bitter and astringent. He thought to himself: I am a farmer, how can I use the Party's good policies to escape poverty and become prosperous?

Ma Wenyi began to gather market information and observe industry trends. Faced with the strong demand for beef in nearby markets, after careful investigation and analysis, he sized up the situation and decided to develop beef cattle farming.

Starting a business is difficult and arduous. When he first began raising beef cattle, because his wife still had to care for the elderly at home and their 2 children in school, all the beef cattle farming work fell entirely on Ma Wenyi alone. He had to get up before dawn every day to add feed for the cattle and clean the cattle shed, and late at night he would get up again to walk around the barn to observe the cattle's growth and health. If he found anything abnormal, he would diagnose and treat it promptly, not daring to be the slightest bit negligent. Although he was so tired every day that his legs felt like they were filled with lead, Ma Wenyi did not relax his study of techniques in the least. He bought many books on beef cattle farming and, rising before dawn and staying up late into the night, used every spare moment to plow through them one by one, taking himself from knowing nothing to mastering the cattle's adaptation period, weight-gain period, fattening period, and more. Through learning while practicing, he ultimately gained a full command of the complete set of cattle-raising techniques, so that from the time his beef cattle entered the pen to the time they left it, they never caught any diseases and never experienced any deaths. Because Ma Wenyi used scientific methods in raising them, every one of his cattle was fat and sturdy, and merchants near and far were already eager to place orders. Cattle farming set Ma Wenyi on the road to prosperity.

Over the past two years, through Ma Wenyi's hard work and labor, he actively sought partners to expand the breeding industry and joined the village's breeding cooperative. At present, Ma Wenyi has 15 beef cattle on hand, with an annual slaughter volume of more than 8 head, and the income from beef cattle farming alone exceeds 40,000 yuan a year.

Ma Wenyi succeeded in beef cattle farming, but he did not forget the farmer's foundation: no matter how much money cattle farming brings in, he cannot let his own land go to waste; on the contrary, he must tend the cultivated land even better. Looking at his farmland, whose harvest was not ideal, Ma Wenyi resolved to make another attempt. He planned to use the profits and spare money from cattle farming to increase investment in the land and use idle fields to grow forage grass, which would both solve the problem of idle farmland and better solve the feed problem for beef cattle farming, saving no small amount of expense for the development of the breeding industry.

Ma Wenyi's enterprising spirit, daring to think, daring to act, and daring to be the first on the road out of poverty, inspired the other villagers. One after another, his fellow villagers came to ask him about cattle-raising experience and applied the new techniques they learned to beef cattle farming, greatly advancing the development of the beef cattle farming industry in Xieling Village. Ma Wenyi thus became the village's widely known specialist cattle farmer.