Eggs Sold into Beijing, Opening Up New Export Markets

Wang Yanxia is feeding the chickens

Just as dawn was breaking, Wang Yanxia and Lan Yongguang, a husband-and-wife couple from Dongxing Village, Bayin Taohai Town, Hainan District, Wuhai City, were already busy: mixing feed, feeding the chickens, and cleaning the coops. Wang Yanxia and Lan Yongguang are the village's major chicken farmers, raising more than 10,000 laying hens in total. Their selenium-enriched eggs not only sell well in Wuhai City, but are also shipped to Hohhot, Beijing and other places.

In 1997, at an agricultural exhibition held in Beijing, Wang Yanxia and her husband were drawn to an exhibit about farmers somewhere who had become rich by raising chickens, and inspired by this, they came up with the idea of starting a chicken farm. After returning home, Wang Yanxia and her husband scraped together a few thousand yuan in loans and bought 500 chicks to start the farm. But the hardships of starting a business were beyond what Wang Yanxia, who had no experience raising chickens, had expected. How should the feed be mixed? How should diseases be prevented and treated? One thorny problem after another came at them. Faced with these difficulties, Wang Yanxia bought a large number of books on chicken-raising techniques and taught herself. Hard work pays off: after a period of trial and error, she solved one problem after another, and the operation of the chicken farm gradually got on track. Over the following two years, Wang Yanxia further expanded the scale of her farming. Although the scale grew, the quality of the eggs was only average, and it was hard to get a good price for them. By a chance, the couple heard that selenium-enriched eggs had a strong market and that the farming method was green and pollution-free, so they decided to focus on raising selenium-enriched laying hens. "When selenium-enriched eggs first came on the market, residents still had doubts about this kind of egg with a greenish shell, and very few people bought them," Wang Yanxia said. To this end, the couple used the tactic of small profits but quick turnover to promote selenium-enriched eggs. Gradually, the high-quality selenium-enriched eggs won residents' favor. In 2006, Wang Yanxia registered the "Bayinbao" selenium-enriched egg trademark, and in 2012, "Bayinbao" became a famous trademark of Inner Mongolia.

Once she was well-off herself, Wang Yanxia led the villagers to raise chickens together, helping them in many ways, including funding, equipment, technology, management and sales. Driven by Wang Yanxia, today their own villager group alone has 14 large-scale farming households, and Wang Yanxia also joined with them to set up a professional cooperative. At present, the cooperative's farming scale has reached more than 80,000 birds, with a daily egg output of 5,000 jin, and annual sales of more than 5 million yuan. Wang Yanxia has also become a widely known leader in getting rich. Next, Wang Yanxia plans to use the spare land at home to develop rural tourism and sightseeing agriculture. "The 'Ten Full Coverage' project has given the village an opportunity to develop rural tourism. The village is beautiful and the roads are open, and many residents are willing to come to the countryside for a visit. On holidays, many residents drive here specially to buy eggs," Wang Yanxia said.