A skilled woman chicken farmer leads rural women to wealth together
On the tree-shaded hillside of Jinchanggouliang Town, Aohan Banner, Inner Mongolia, chicken coops come into view one after another, and flocks of free-range mountain chickens are foraging everywhere under the shade of trees and in the grass... This is the green chicken farm of Xiachanggao Village, Jinchanggouliang Town, and its owner is Ren Shasha, a newly appointed female village official of Xiachanggao.
Ren Shasha and her husband previously made a living by farming more than ten mu of dry land, working from dawn to dusk, and barely making ends meet all year round. In 2011, Ren Shasha saw on TV that farmers in Yichang had become large-scale breeding households with assets of one million yuan by raising mountain chickens. A thought of getting rich grew in her mind. She thought that Xiachanggao Village had many mountains and trees, and under the trees were natural activity areas for free-range chickens. Raising chickens in the woods meant the chickens would eat insects and grass under the trees, which not only saved chicken feed, but the chicken manure also fertilized the woodland. If she set up a chicken farm under the trees on the mountain, not only would the free-range chicken meat be good, but the cost would also be low, and she estimated that sales would not be a problem.
Speaking of the hardships at the beginning of her business, Ren Shasha said that at first she started the chicken farming business simply with interest and enthusiasm, but she never expected that raising them would really not be an easy thing. At first, she invested more than 200,000 yuan to introduce chicks, build chicken coops, and buy feed. Due to poor skills and lack of experience, the survival rate of the first batch of chicks was less than 50%. In the end, when they had no money to keep operating, the two had to tearfully sell their new tiled house and continue to introduce chicks to expand the scale of chicken farming. After that, whenever Ren Shasha had free time, she went online to look up all kinds of information, read farming books, and repeatedly asked local skilled chicken farmers for "hands-on" guidance. After a year of painstaking operation, she finally reaped her first pot of gold from raising free-range chickens at the end of 2013. At this time, targeted poverty alleviation policies benefiting the people were introduced, and there was policy and financial support for developing the breeding industry, so Ren Shasha became even more confident in raising free-range chickens. The price of free-range eggs was 3 times that of ordinary eggs, and each free-range chicken could sell for a good price of one hundred yuan. The green free-range chickens were not only sold well locally, but also sold well through the Internet in Liaoning, Hebei and other places.
Ren Shasha did not forget her neighbors after getting rich, and the people's trust in her increased accordingly. In the 2015 village-level election, Ren Shasha was elected as a member of the village committee and director of the women's congress with a high vote. In order not to let everyone down, she gathered middle-aged women in the village who were educated and quick-minded, and actively taught free-range chicken breeding techniques. Driven by her, 37 rural women in the village have taken up free-range chicken farming, and the first "Women's Green Free-Range Chicken Breeding Base" in Xiachanggao Village has been built, striving to open up a broader market.
Zhu Zhendong Han Xiumin