Pheasant Market Is Booming: Young Man Gives Up High Salary to Return Home and Start a Farm
Peng Dong is an entrepreneurial young man living in Shuangping Village, Yundou Town, Shiquan County, at the foot of Lingque Mountain. He said, "After I first got involved with pheasants 5 years ago, I never went out to work again, and started a breeding business at home." After the local poverty alleviation platform was established, he was the first young person from Yundou who had been working elsewhere to return home and start a business.
7 mu of fir forest, with an annual rent of 700 yuan, serves as the rewilding site for the pheasants after they are taken off heat. In the winter of 2015, Peng Dong once again returned home from working in Jiangsu for the Chinese New Year, and saw that many of the sloping fields and forest farms in his hometown were gradually becoming barren. Peng Dong felt an urge in his heart to do something for his hometown!
His connection with pheasant farming began 5 years ago. Wild animal breeding belongs to special breeding, and back then it was not easy to obtain a special breeding permit, so later Peng Dong gave up working away from home.
At the beginning of the year, he learned that Yundou Town was vigorously developing industries, and that the town and villages supported young people with ideas to return home and start businesses, encouraging young people to return home to start businesses and find employment with the approach of "What do you want to do? Find the right point! Be bold and do it, the town and village will guarantee resources." In March, Peng Dong resolutely returned to his hometown and took up pheasant farming again.
He went to many places to investigate, one after another. On April 25, 1,200 American pheasant breed chicks were airlifted from Guangzhou to Xianyang, and Peng Dong personally hired a vehicle to bring them home. The elders in the family had also opposed it out of consideration for the risks, but relatives and friends were very supportive.
On July 22, the first batch of 1,200 chicks were taken off heat in a pen set up in an old earthen house.
It happened to be Major Heat, and the weather was unusually hot. In order to help this young man, the Shiquan County General Trade Union, which is paired with Shuangping, secured 3,000 yuan in startup funds for Peng Dong and looked in many ways for sales channels for the pheasants. Friends around him also helped him as much as they could.
Modern feeding and watering equipment and other such basic infrastructure, plus the chicks, cost 120,000 yuan in total, and he took out a loan. His wife temporarily lives with their child at her parents' home in Hunan, while Peng Dong puts all his thoughts into the breeding business.
First Secretary Jiang, stationed in the village, said: "Pheasants have ornamental value, and the market is currently booming. If sales channels are gradually opened up, they can sell for a good price."
At present, these pheasants weigh a little over one jin on average, and they can be sold once they reach five months of age. Peng Dong said: "We are currently in the presale period, and I have already received some orders. There are also folks from Raofeng who came to investigate and tried to bring him into their cooperative. We are currently in the trial breeding stage. If it succeeds and makes money, we will expand the scale and lead fellow villagers to raise them together."
In the future, what will connect Shuangping, Xianlian, and Qijian will be a whole "ten-thousand-mu tea garden," and a tourism loop line will pass by Peng Dong's pheasant forest farm. The whole county has already put all-for-one rural tourism on the 130,000 development agenda, and all-for-one tourism in Yundou Town is about to enter the substantive stage of construction.
Huashang reporter Wang Bin, intern Qian Xin