The story of the "Chicken Commander" raising chickens in a border mountain village

Deep in the mountain hamlet, the trees grow thick and lush.

Leaving downtown Ruili, after more than 30 km of winding mountain roads and another 2 km of gravel track, the reporter arrived at Huwa Village and saw the tile-roofed houses, the chicken coops, and Duan Biqing, chairman of the Huwashan Free-Range Chicken Breeding Professional Cooperative, whom the villagers call the "Chicken Commander." Dark-skinned and nearly 30, the young man looks much older than his actual age.

Huwa Village lies in the northwestern mountains of Ruili City, Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan; across a small river is Myanmar. Of the village's more than 1,400 residents, over 800 are Jingpo, and nearly 500 are registered poor households. The villagers live scattered across more than 10 sq km of mountain forest, earn their main income from growing sugarcane, and have a per capita annual net income of only a little over 2,000 yuan, making this a typical impoverished border ethnic-minority village.

"The first time I came here, I thought the whole way, what am I going to do, what am I going to do, and it felt like I walked from afternoon until dark." Duan Biqing was a city kid, and in 2009 he came here for the first time as a selected college-graduate "village official." Conditions were harsh, and his monthly take-home pay was only 1,000 yuan; of the 23 college-graduate "village officials" in the same group, nearly half left within the first year.

At that time the village had no cement road, and the dozens of li of bumpy mountain track left him with scars on his knees and chin that remain to this day. When he first came to Huwa Village, "it was really too hard." Duan Biqing felt lost and didn't know what to do. Once, he spent three months visiting every household in the village, and the poverty he saw with his own eyes moved him; looking at the low-yield forest the villagers depended on for their livelihood, he conceived the idea of raising free-range chickens to lead the villagers to prosperity.

"City kids aren't reliable, just messing around." The villagers were not optimistic at first, so Duan Biqing decided to try it himself first; only if he succeeded as the trailblazer would the villagers have the confidence to follow.

Short of funds, he persuaded his family to mortgage their only house for a loan.

To raise chickens in the mountains, he first had to open roads, bring in electricity and water. He paved the road bit by bit in the mountains, strung up wires on bamboo poles, and piped water down from the mountain. "I'd never done physical labor before; to dig a small trench for laying a water pipe, I dug for 3 days and only got 20 m, and my hands were covered in blood blisters." Recalling those days, Duan Biqing laughed.

Sleeping in the mountains was a big problem; in summer mosquitoes and insects got through the hut enclosed with bamboo strips, so several coils of mosquito repellent had to be lit, and on winter nights the mountains were bitterly cold, so he could only fall asleep wearing a down jacket and wrapped in a quilt.

And so it went: a little hut built of bamboo, battered by wind and frost; a remote deep mountain with few people around, as winter came and summer went. One spadeful of mud, one shovelful of earth, and the chicken coop began to take shape in the mountain forest; one step deep, one step shallow, Duan Biqing kept at it for 7 years.

He had never had anything to do with raising chickens and knew nothing about the techniques; in the first batch he raised 1,050, nearly half died, and the surviving chickens simply would not grow big. To figure out breeding techniques, he read books, went online, and visited chicken farms one by one to ask for advice...

After repeated failures, at last the chicken farm began to show results.

But the first thing Duan Biqing thought of was how to help more villagers get rich by raising chickens; he began using a "base + farmers" model, set up a cooperative, let farmers buy chicks and materials from him on credit, helped the villagers draw up breeding plans, and bought back all grown chickens in cash at a guaranteed floor price 15% above market price. By now, among the more than 170 farming households cooperating with Duan Biqing, more than 90 are registered poor households.

The account books fill 12 cabinets: the loans farmers take out here for chicks and materials, and then the income from buybacks, after deducting the cost of chicks and materials, settling 3,470 yuan, 2,580 yuan, 1,745 yuan with the farmers... The accounts between Duan Biqing and the villagers over these years are recorded one by one, clear and plain. A rough calculation: of the 170,000 chickens sold last year, total net profit came to 2.05 million yuan, of which the cooperating farming households accounted for 1.72 million yuan.

Villager Dao Mudong's family raises more than 1,000 chickens, and the household has only her and her husband as labor. An elderly family member is bedridden, she has to support the whole family, and there is also a relative's child fostered with them. "Relying on farming is a heavy burden; raising chickens brings in some income, but there are also many places to spend it." "Good person, good person, good person." When Duan Biqing is mentioned, she says "good person" three times in a row in not-so-fluent Chinese.

"Better than farming, and you can stay home." Villager Musang runs a small shop, has two elderly people and two children at home, and raises more than 800 chickens. "Duan Biqing treats us well; when we don't have funds to turn over, he doesn't come pressing for payment." She figures there are still dozens of mu of land up the mountain, and in the future she wants to go up the mountain to raise even more chickens.

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Changing backward attitudes and teaching farmers techniques is the most important thing." Duan Biqing treats training as a major undertaking.

Chicken coops, fields, the village committee, schools... sometimes just two or three people, sometimes as many as a hundred, Duan Biqing has again and again taught villagers deep in the mountains about breeding and e-commerce, sometimes holding more than a dozen training sessions in a month. Farmers from impoverished mountain areas such as Longchuan, Yingjiang and Lianghe also often come to the chicken farm to learn techniques for brooding chicks after temperature reduction, and Duan Biqing eats and lives with them without charging a cent.

More and more farming households are cooperating in the breeding. With the cooperative, the problem of the farmers' "first kilometer" of breeding has been solved, but as more and more chickens are raised, sales become a problem; Duan Biqing set his sights on e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores, hoping to better connect the free-range chickens, which carry the farmers' hopes of escaping poverty and getting rich, with the "last kilometer."

His peers' children are already running all over the floor, but Duan Biqing has his heart entirely in the cooperative and has still not married. "I think I'm really quite happy; this isn't something that can be compared by how much money you make." Talking about leading the villagers out of poverty, he doesn't say much, but his pride rises spontaneously: "I want to help them, I must help..."