A new way to raise pigs: How did Kuang Meizhong do it?
“Xiao Kuang, several of my sows have had multiple miscarriages, and the piglets are showing symptoms of weight loss, coughing and death. More than 100 have died within a month. What is going on?” Recently, Kuang Meizhong of Yutian Village, Chonglingjiang Town, Guiyang County, Hunan Province, received a phone call from Chen Haiqiang, a large-scale farmer in Linwu County in a neighboring county.
Kuang Meizhong immediately promised to make a special trip the next day to look into the situation. After dissecting the dead pigs on site, Kuang Meizhong diagnosed this as a mixed infection of Haemophilus parasuis caused by porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus.
Kuang Meizhong, this young man of 32, is the most popular member of Guiyang County's "pig friends circle" and also the county's only college-educated "pig man." He not only runs his own pig farm with an annual output of 2,300 head, but also voluntarily provides technical guidance to more than 60 other farming households.
In 2006, after graduating from Jiangsu Animal Husbandry and Veterinary College, he went to work for an ecological agriculture enterprise in Zhejiang. With a down-to-earth spirit, Kuang Meizhong was quickly promoted to assistant to the general manager. In September 2006, when he was in a period of career advancement, he resolutely decided to resign and return home to raise pigs and develop "pig—biogas—fruit" ecological circular agriculture, despite his family's opposition.
Realizing that opposition was useless, his parents had no choice but to support their son under pressure. Kuang Meizhong, together with his parents, three people, three hoes and three shares of effort, built mountain roads, pig houses and biogas pits on the contracted barren hills. After more than 100 days and nights of hard work, the first batch of more than 40 piglets entered the pens.
In the month that followed, the weather remained continuously hot. Kuang Meizhong realized that high temperatures might trigger porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome. Before the government carried out free vaccination, he paid out of his own pocket to vaccinate the pigs. As expected, a few months later porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome broke out in various places one after another, and many farming households suffered heavy losses, but he escaped the danger, earned his first pot of gold and also won the recognition of local farming households. The scale of his pig farm also expanded again and again, from the initial one pig house of 240 sq m to 8 pig houses of more than 3,000 sq m today, and the ecological circular agriculture model has also taken shape.
While raising pigs scientifically, Kuang Meizhong also put great effort into the scientific management of the pig farm. “Although I raise more and more pigs, the pig farm hires fewer and fewer workers, and I do not need to personally look after them every day.” While chatting with the reporter, Kuang Meizhong took out his mobile phone, opened a pig farming management software, entered the corresponding code, and the pig farm's information "popped" out, down to every single pig.
Kuang Meizhong explained that pathological analysis can be done based on these data. For example, by comparing indicators such as the average birth weight and weaning weight of piglets born to sows, the reproductive performance of sows can be judged, helping the pig farm achieve survival of the fittest. In addition, warning prompts are set for which pigs should be given which vaccines and when, so nothing will ever be missed.
“With 'Pig Man Kuang,' there is no panic in raising pigs.” In the eyes of the villagers, the college-educated Kuang Meizhong has indeed developed a "new way" of raising pigs. In order to lead more people to raise pigs scientifically, Kuang Meizhong not only drives farming households to develop together through the Dalian Pig Farming Professional Cooperative that he founded, but also uses the WeChat "Pig Pig Night Talk" group chat platform every day to exchange "farming experience" with more than 60 nearby large-scale pig farmers.
Li Shi, our reporter Yang Juan