Post-85 grain-growing tycoon raises sheep in Yushu, Jilin

In Yushu City, Jilin Province, 31-year-old Jiang Enkai is a grain-growing tycoon known far and wide. Young as he is, he is already an "old hand" at farming.

In the past two years, Jiang Enkai has used corn stalks to feed fattening sheep and achieved good economic returns. Nowadays, he is not just a grain-growing tycoon but also a well-known large-scale livestock breeder in the area.

In Rongyu Village, Gongpeng Town, Yushu City, when the reporter met Jiang Enkai, he was checking the growth of the meat sheep in the pen. Seeing the reporter, he excitedly opened up.

"These sheep are a breed introduced from South Africa, called Doper. Their feature is good meat quality. After crossbreeding with local sheep, all the offspring are meat sheep with a very good taste, and their fertility rate is relatively high," Jiang Enkai said.

Corn is the main grain crop in Jilin Province. While Jilin Province has enjoyed consecutive bumper grain harvests, it has also produced a great deal of a by-product -- stalks.

At present, Jiang Enkai operates 524 hectares of transferred land. Every autumn, he is happy about the harvest on the one hand, and on the other he has a headache over how to dispose of 3,500 tons of stalks.

After consulting a large amount of material, Jiang Enkai hit on the idea of raising sheep.

Jiang Enkai told the reporter that 1,000 sheep can fully convert more than 3,500 tons of stalks. "At first I introduced 500 ewes to convert the stalks. Sheep manure can also be returned to the fields as farmyard manure." To raise the sheep well, Jiang Enkai travelled around to study, and after repeated experiments, he even specially designed a sheep shed suited to local use.

In front of the sheep pen, the reporter saw that strips of bamboo of uniform length were neatly laid out to form a flat surface, with a certain gap left between it and the ground.

Jiang Enkai excitedly introduced his innovation to the reporter: "These bamboo strips are the sheep bed. The manure the sheep excrete on top falls straight down below. Two motors scrape the sheep manure back and forth repeatedly, and after it is scraped out, it can be loaded onto a cart with a shovel and taken straight to the fields for fertilizing."

Besides the unique sheep bed, the sheep shed's water supply, drainage and manure pumping system is also equipped with automated equipment, which makes management convenient and saves labor. At present, Jiang Enkai's household has more than 700 meat sheep on hand, and all the management work can be completed by just two people.

"We add feed twice a day and hay twice a day. The rest is delivering lambs and giving injections to the few sheep with minor ailments," said Yang Dianyou, a keeper.

Right now, Jiang Enkai, bearing the new title of "big sheep raiser," is planning to expand production scale and strive for an annual slaughter of 30,000 meat sheep.

"I make more from raising sheep than other smallholders. Each sheep raised by a smallholder costs 300 yuan a year in feed, while my sheep eat stalks that cost nothing, which greatly reduces feeding costs," Jiang Enkai said.