Raising porcupines brings in 400,000 yuan a year, a high school graduate finds a unique path
Yu Qianping is a member of the post-80s generation and developed a great interest in raising porcupines. He started with 30 breeding porcupines, and after more than two years of self-breeding and self-raising, by March 2016 his farm had 460 breeding porcupines in stock, covered more than 500 sq m, and created a net income of more than 400,000 yuan a year. Yu Qianping's next step is to hop aboard the national rural e-commerce express, build up his rural Taobao store, and carry out online promotion and sales.
Many people in Neijiang, Sichuan raise pigs, but only one raises porcupines, and that is the "Qianqian Porcupine Farm in Shizhong District, Neijiang City." The owner is Yu Qianping, a post-80s migrant worker who returned to his hometown in Huangjin Village, Lingjia Town, Shizhong District, Neijiang City.
Yu Qianping was born in December 1988. After graduating from high school in 2006, he worked for many years in Dongguan, Chengdu, Guiyang and Chongqing, and later started his own businesses, running a clothing store and a food stall.
After years of working away from home, Yu Qianping always had a bigger dream of starting his own business. He dreamed of making a name for himself in his hometown, staying by his parents' side and his child's side, lightening his parents' burden, improving their quality of life, and caring for his child's healthy growth.
To realize his dream, while working away from home Yu Qianping watched news about farming, breeding and entrepreneurship on CCTV's agriculture channel or the Wealth Classic channel almost every night. By chance he saw a project on TV about raising porcupines. The TV program said that as people's living standards improve and they pay more attention to the rationality of food nutrition, wild vegetables, wild fruits and wild animals have become a new quality, new fashion and new trend that people pursue. Porcupine meat is hailed as "animal ginseng" and "a top-grade mountain delicacy and game," with high edible and medicinal value. Porcupine farming has simple technology, strong disease resistance, low feed costs with farm-style feed, convenient feeding and management, is pollution-free and environmentally friendly, requires low manual labor intensity, and has large profit potential. Yu Qianping immediately became interested and felt it was a project with prospects. After that, he constantly looked up information about porcupine farming online, and used his vacations to visit Jiangxi, Hunan, Zhejiang and other places to inspect and learn.
In October 2014, Yu Qianping and his wife He Chunyan gave up their easy administrative jobs at an enterprise in Chengdu and resolutely returned to their hometown to raise porcupines. He invested 300,000 yuan to build the farm and bring in breeding porcupines. He renovated the old house he lived in and the pens he had previously used to raise domestic pigs, saving on costs. In December 2014, once the site, pens, water supply, lighting and feed were all ready, he contacted the sellers in Jiangxi and Hunan he had visited during his inspections and had them deliver the breeding porcupines to his door.
At the end of 2014, the Qianqian Porcupine Farm in Shizhong District, Neijiang City was officially established.
Yu Qianping started with 30 breeding porcupines, and after more than two years of self-breeding and self-raising, by March 2016 his farm had 460 breeding porcupines in stock, covered more than 500 sq m, and created a net income of more than 400,000 yuan a year.
In 2016, Yu Qianping used 3,000 sq m of his own land and planned 1,000 pens, preparing to expand the breeding porcupine stock scale to more than 1,000 and produce more than 6,000 large and small porcupines a year.
As of June 2016, Yu Qianping's Qianqian Porcupine Farm had successfully joined 5 e-commerce enterprises - Neijiang Ganjie Network, Rural Taobao Network, Neijiang Huangjiaojing Mall Network, Neijiang E-commerce Association Network and Zhumeng Life Network - and had 2 independent online stores and 6 websites for promotion. He also opened his own Weidian and Taobao stores online. Yu Qianping's porcupine farm was also included in a government project, which means the government will provide support subsidies and publicity for the Qianqian Porcupine Farm every year. The Neijiang E-commerce Incubation Park arranged an office for Yu Qianping in the High-tech Economic Development Zone, allowing Yu Qianping's porcupine farm to have an office in the city. On June 17, 2016, Qianqian Porcupine Farm took part in the South Sichuan Expo held in Neijiang for promotion and publicity. Neijiang Municipal Party Secretary Yang Songbai and Mayor Ren Xiaochun inspected the site in person and praised his unique path of returning home to start a business. At the expo, everyone who tasted Qianqian porcupine meat gave a thumbs-up. At the South Sichuan Expo, Yu Qianping successfully attracted 4 e-commerce enterprises and 3 local food processing factories.
The porcupines raised by Yu Qianping have already been sold far away to Dazhou, Mianyang, Yibin, Luzhou, Suining, Nanchong, Bazhong, Liangshan Prefecture and other cities and prefectures in Sichuan, as well as Gansu, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Hunan, Hubei, Yunnan, Guizhou, Chongqing and other provinces and cities.
Yu Qianping's next step is to hop aboard the national rural e-commerce express, build up his rural Taobao store, carry out online promotion and sales, and then attract food processing factories to develop porcupine meat, get porcupine meat into supermarkets and malls, strengthen and expand his business, and realize the model of internet + company + base + farmers, driving more nearby farmers to raise porcupines together. He also plans to attract investment to set up a factory, expand the scale of deep processing of porcupine food, embark on the road to prosperity through the industrialization of porcupine farming, and get porcupine meat onto the dining tables of thousands of households.