Few people pay attention to earthworm farming, but if you try it slowly, you might just succeed
Wei Shou was born into a farming family in Laibin City, Guangxi. He managed to escape rural life by getting into Guangxi University to study philosophy, but after graduating he did not stay in the city to work as a white-collar employee as everyone expected. Instead, he brought his girlfriend to Pingyang Town, Yinhai District, Beihai City, to work with mud and start raising earthworms.
From having nothing at all to buying a home and settling down in Beihai, getting married and having children, and leading more than 10 nearby farming households to raise earthworms and prosper together, Wei Shou needed only a little over two years. During this time, he and his wife, who started the business with him, not only had to face dirt and exhaustion that most people could hardly imagine, but also enormous technical and market risks. Fortunately, they got through it all.
“Studying philosophy lets me see things from farther ahead when doing things.” Wei Shou said that although earthworm farming has nothing to do with his philosophy major, whether something can be done successfully often has a lot to do with the doer's vision and breadth of mind.
Guangxi's first university graduate to sell earthworms to other provinces
“Philosophy is the least popular and hardest major to find a job with. In all of Guangxi, only Guangxi University offered this one class.” Wei Shou said bluntly that his classmates either took the postgraduate entrance exam or studied a second major.
During university, Wei Shou studied while also looking for all kinds of internship opportunities in society. He worked in human resources and baijiu sales, and also helped an outsourced bank pull in loans and sell insurance. After trying many kinds of jobs, he found that none of them were what he wanted.
After graduating in 2012, Wei Shou came to Beihai with his girlfriend and at first worked at an agricultural company opened by a friend. Under the guidance of the company boss, Wei Shou, who had loved raising small birds and turtles since childhood, suddenly discovered a farming project that interested him——raising earthworms.
Earthworms can be used in medicine and as fish bait, and earthworm castings are an especially high-quality organic fertilizer. Moreover, earthworm farming has a short cycle and quick results, and fits the social development trend of environmental protection and recyclability. While working at the company, Wei Shou visited mature nearby farming bases to learn and investigate, searched bookstores and the internet for all kinds of technical materials, and spent 8 months conducting research and preparation.
At that time, domestic earthworm farming had already reached a relatively large scale in northern China, but not many people in Guangxi were farming them. This was because the northern rainy season is concentrated in July and August, allowing large-scale open-field farming, and the developed local livestock industry provided abundant manure as a source for earthworm farming; in the south, however, it rains all year round, and earthworms are afraid of rain, so greenhouses must be built, and farming materials are also relatively limited, all of which increased farming costs.
After analysis, Wei Shou also discovered that the subtropical region had many unique advantages: Guangxi has high temperatures all year round and can farm for several more months each year than the north. Although overall costs are higher than in the north, the yield per mu is also higher. Through inquiries from various sources, he found local waste residue in Beihai and Qinzhou left after processing cassava chips into ethanol, which was especially suitable as a material for earthworm farming.
Although the preparation was relatively thorough, putting it into practice was still full of difficulties. Wei Shou still remembers that the first batch of breeding stock he had finally scraped together more than 20,000 yuan to buy died in large numbers that very night, causing a loss of more than 3,000 yuan. “Later we found out that when we had asked farmers for advice earlier, they did not want their techniques to spread, so the guidance they gave us was relatively conservative, which led to problems in how we treated the bedding material.”
Raising funds is a problem every entrepreneur encounters. Relying on his advantage of having joined many student organizations during university, Wei Shou mobilized roommates and group friends everywhere and raised tens of thousands of yuan in initial investment. Wei Shou's wife graduated from the School of Literature at Guangxi University. With her help, the two took part in an entrepreneurship competition held in Tianjin. Because their project proposal was very thorough and their on-site speech and PPT presentation were also well done, their project won second prize in the competition and received a 150,000 yuan interest-free loan from the organizers.
With this money, they built greenhouses, bought a loader and a tricycle, and encouraged nearby farming households to raise earthworms as well in order to create economies of scale.
How to open up the market was where Wei Shou, a university graduate, differed most from traditional farmers. Many traditional farmers relied on distributors coming to their door to buy, but distributors often drove the purchase price very low, leaving farmers with thin profits or even losses. Wei Shou, however, thought of using the internet. He posted sales information on relevant forums and Tieba pages, and soon out-of-town merchants contacted him to buy.
“Although at first they were all relatively small-volume customers, for us in the early stage of starting the business it was very important and solved our cash flow problem.” Wei Shou said that at the time, they were the only ones in all of Guangxi who dared to ship goods out of the region. To reduce logistics costs, they asked at bus station after bus station, looking for long-distance buses with suitable operating times. When they first shipped goods out of the region, because of insufficient experience, it often happened that the boxes heated up and the earthworms died, or the seals were not tight and the earthworms crawled into the luggage compartments of the long-distance buses.
Looking back on that experience, Wei Shou described it as “truly accumulated through blood and tears.” He was scolded plenty of times by station drivers and often reshipped at a loss to out-of-town customers whose earthworms had died in transit. Because of his sincerity and honesty, some customers even advised him on how to place soil and ice when packing.
Wei Shou's sincerity was also shown in his generosity. For every 20-jin shipment, he often gave an extra jin when sending the goods. His reputation built up in the industry, and more and more customers asked him for goods. Now Wei Shou's earthworms have been sold to many provinces including Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian and Zhejiang.
The optimism and persistence that a typhoon could not blow away
Just as Wei Shou's earthworm farming business was beginning to get on track, a sudden typhoon pulled him from the peak of entrepreneurship back to the bottom.
On July 19, 2014, Super Typhoon Rammasun made landfall on the Beibu Gulf, with forecast wind force reaching levels 12 to 13. On the night the typhoon arrived, worried that the greenhouses would be blown apart, Wei Shou stayed up all night in the dormitory building next to them.
There was a live report on Typhoon Rammasun on a local Beihai forum. Wei Shou still remembers that when he was scrolling through the forum that night, at first the weather forecast said the wind force was level 13, not long after it became level 15, and in the end the maximum wind force became level 17. In the shaking dormitory building, the sound of steel pipes crashing down not far away reached his ears from time to time.
After midnight the wind became a little weaker. Wei Shou risked opening the door, braved the wind and rain to get into the van, and wanted to drive to the edge of the greenhouses to see the situation. As soon as he went out, his headlamp was broken by the rain. He staggered into the van and did not even dare to pull the handbrake, “afraid that once I pulled it the whole vehicle would fly!”
After waiting for quite a while, when the wind was a little weaker, he drove the van next to the greenhouses. The scene before his eyes was so disastrous it was “like experiencing a world war.” Apart from the greenhouse frames still being there, everything else had been blown away. “At that point it was no longer a question of whether we could make money, but a question of staying alive.” Worried that steel pipes on the greenhouses would keep falling, Wei Shou parked the van and ran back to the dormitory holding his head.
Because the greenhouse roofs were blown off, and because there was no electricity for more than 10 days in a row, the earthworms being farmed inside the greenhouses died on a large scale. Wei Shou had no goods to sell for 5 consecutive months, and that year's loss reached more than 200,000 yuan.
After the typhoon, seven or eight farming households in Beihai who had followed Wei Shou in raising earthworms said they were unwilling to keep raising them. But Wei Shou did not give up. “To be honest, we young people have no capital other than being young. Breed slowly, one becomes two, two become 4, and in half a year everything can be fully restored.”
Wei Shou's optimism and persistence once again brought him good luck. After learning about the difficulties he had encountered, the Beihai Youth Entrepreneurship Promotion Association under the Communist Youth League Beihai Municipal Committee helped him apply for 50,000 yuan in interest-free youth entrepreneurship support funds, and Wei Shou's earthworm farming business got back on track again.
In Wei Shou's view, entrepreneurship is always accompanied by risks and difficulties. For example, now, with the overall decline of the domestic macroeconomy, there are fewer export goods, which has led to fewer backhaul vehicles from Guizhou to the coast. In the past, sending a truckload of organic fertilizer to Guizhou cost him only 150 yuan per ton, but now the freight has risen to 300 yuan per ton. How to adapt to the external environment and reduce costs has become the problem he thinks about most at present.
No matter how many difficulties he encounters, Wei Shou firmly believes he can keep going. What drives him to start a business is his interest in this industry, not whether this industry is the most profitable.
“When young people go out to start businesses now, 80% of them are not working in fields related to their majors. That is very normal.” Wei Shou said that entrepreneurship places especially high demands on a person's subsequent learning ability. Studying philosophy in university back then gave him a method for understanding the world and handling problems, which is also a benefit for life.
Wei Shou firmly believes that in the future, earthworm farming is an industry with great potential. In Nanning alone, the landfill can sort out hundreds of tons of organic waste every day, and earthworms can play a big role in decomposing and treating this organic waste. Moreover, in the future earthworms can also be brought into households. Besides raising turtles and feeding fish, they can also treat kitchen waste and then produce organic fertilizer, directly used to grow green and healthy balcony flowers and balcony vegetables, forming a positive ecological cycle.
“Now very few people pay attention to this field and think this line of work does not make money, but I want to try slowly. What if I succeed?” Wei Shou said.