College graduates return home to start businesses raising loaches and lead villagers to prosperity together
On May 25, in Gaoshan Village, Purun Town, Longchang County, Li Kaijiang, a partner of Xinsheng Loach Farm, rolled up his trouser legs and waded unevenly through the pond to transfer loach fry.
In 2012, three like-minded college graduates - Lu Fujian, Li Kaijiang and Li Wendian - returned home after graduation to start businesses and built Xinsheng Loach Farm. "Purun Town is a major aquaculture town, mainly raising the four major Chinese carps, and the profits are not high. We want to use the techniques we learned at Sichuan Agricultural University to change this situation," Li Kaijiang said.
The road to entrepreneurship is hard. They get up at 6 a.m. and, apart from a break for lunch, stay busy until 9 p.m. When on night duty, they still have to get up several times to check conditions in the fish ponds. Seedling rearing, farming and sales - every task must be done personally.
"One summer a typhoon hit and even blew away the thatched hut we were living in. We almost thought about giving up," said leader Lu Fujian.
At the critical moment, departments at all levels in Longchang County lent a hand: the county employment bureau granted each of them a 10,000 yuan entrepreneurship subsidy and helped them apply for a two-year 100,000 yuan interest-free loan; the county fisheries and fishery administration bureau regularly arranged personnel to provide technical guidance; and Purun Town helped them apply for an 80,000 yuan entrepreneurship support project and coordinated funds to renovate their office space.
While attending free entrepreneurship training organized by the county employment bureau, Lu Fujian also gained new ideas on development. "We have an advantage in technology. The reason development has not gone well is that the scale of operations is not large enough. What can we achieve with just the 100 mu of fish ponds we contracted ourselves?"
After discussion, the three decided to establish an aquaculture professional cooperative, using their technical advantages to attract the town's farmers to work together and form the advantage of group operations.
Early last year, work related to the establishment of the cooperative began. To attract more members to join, the three set aside several ponds for experiments and showed everyone step by step. "The villagers are all skilled fish farmers. How can we persuade them to follow us if we do not show real results?" Lu Fujian said.
As a result, after one farming season last year, the profit per hectare of fish ponds was 30,000 yuan higher than what farmers achieved working on their own. More and more people were willing to join. By December last year, when the Longchang County Zhongxin Aquaculture Farmers Professional Cooperative was established, it already had more than 60 member households, covering almost all aquaculture farmers in Purun Town, with a farming area of nearly 300 hectares.
Guo Fengkai, a 50-year-old villager from Gaoshan Village, has a relatively difficult family situation, and the cost of treating his wife's illness often left him with nothing to rely on. Last year, with the help of Lu Fujian and others, Guo Fengkai raised one season of loach fry and made a net profit of 13,000 yuan, an increase of nearly 10,000 yuan over previous years.
Under the leadership of the three "leading geese," the traditional farming model in Purun Town also changed: Xinsheng Loach Farm uniformly supplied fry and handled sales, and provided technical support; farming varieties shifted from the traditional four major Chinese carps to higher-profit varieties such as Taiwan loach, white snakehead and yellow catfish; and sales changed from only selling adult fish to placing equal emphasis on selling adult fish and fry. "This year our fish fry and loach fry were long ago reserved by large farms in Yibin, Luzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing and other places, and demand exceeds supply," Lu Fujian said. Next, they will try to integrate surrounding townships, further expand the farming scale, and lead more people to prosperity.