Qianjiang crayfish are even hotter, and seedling breeding is seizing the commanding heights
Original title: Qianjiang seizes the commanding heights of crayfish seedling breeding
Hubei Leike Group's crayfish breeding base. Photo by reporter Ma Yalun (online illustration: Hubei Daily)
As summer begins, crayfish enter the peak marketing season. Zheng Yulin, president of the Hubei Province Crayfish Industry Association and chairman of Hubei Leike Group, told reporters: "At present, the company's foreign crayfish processing orders keep coming in, and domestic crayfish dining consumption is extremely hot. Besides braised crayfish, each place has its own way of eating them. In the past they were sold by the basin, but now the price is equivalent to selling them by the piece, and it rises year after year."
Hubei Leike Group is located in Qianjiang City, the "Hometown of Chinese Crayfish." Zheng Yulin, who has been engaged in the crayfish industry for many years, acutely judged that although crayfish are becoming an important development target for adjusting the structure of planting and breeding in some regions, and output keeps increasing, due to strong demand, domestic and international markets will still see a relatively tight supply-demand relationship in the coming years. It is worth noting that in recent years the development of the crayfish industry chain has been unbalanced. At the front end, in seedling breeding, variety quality degeneration is serious and the supply of breeding crayfish sources is insufficient. At the back end, in the catering industry, crayfish food consumption continues to be hot, and some restaurants set the retail price for the whole year based on the opening price when crayfish first come on the market, which to some extent raises the consumption threshold for crayfish. All of this affects the sustained and healthy development of the entire industry chain.
"The crayfish industry chain has four links: improved breed selection - mass propagation - healthy aquaculture - processing and catering. Whether the seedlings are good or not directly relates to the output and quality of subsequent crayfish farming and processing. Now huge market demand is forcing breeding research to accelerate its pace." Shu Xinya, a senior engineer at the Hubei Provincial Fisheries Science Research Institute, introduced that the crayfish industry chain shows a situation in which the front end is small and the back end is huge, seedling breeding capacity is insufficient, and the related scientific research system is not sound. In 2015, the total area for crayfish farming in various types of water bodies in Hubei Province exceeded 4 million mu, of which the area for rice-field crayfish farming was nearly 2.8 million mu. Crayfish seedlings are far from meeting the development needs of the industry, and it is urgent to increase support for the industrial development of improved crayfish breed selection and large-scale breeding of high-quality seedlings.
Three years ago, Li Hongzhong, secretary of the Hubei Provincial Party Committee and director of the Hubei Provincial People's Congress, listened to opinions and suggestions from Zheng Yulin, a deputy to the provincial people's congress, on supporting a crayfish improved breed selection and breeding base. The provincial people's congress handled the project construction as a key proposal, and the provincial government allocated special funds to support Qianjiang City in relying on Leike Group and adopting a market-oriented operation model of "government leadership, enterprise as the main body" to build the Hubei Province Crayfish Improved Breed Selection and Breeding Center.
Up to now, the entire project of the crayfish seedling selection and breeding center built in Qianjiang has completed a project monetary volume of 300 million yuan, the 200-mu crayfish improved breed selection center has been put into use, and Leike Group, together with the Gui Jianfang Academician Expert Workstation of the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has newly built 40,000 mu of crayfish improved breed expansion and breeding bases.
It pioneered in China and even the world a number of important technological inventions and innovations, including the "five-in-one" and "five models" artificial mass breeding induction methods for crayfish and industrialized breeding methods, breaking through technical difficulties such as synchronous spawning of crayfish parents, mass propagation, and mass seedling supply. Since last year, nearly 2 billion shrimp seedlings have been sold, among which seedlings for 400,000 mu of farming area were supplied to other places in the province, and nearly 500 million seedlings were sold to Hunan, Anhui, Jiangxi and other provinces.
"When the crayfish industry develops to a certain extent, it is not about how many crayfish were sold, but about how many seedlings and how much technology were sold." Hu Gongmin, secretary of the Qianjiang Municipal Party Committee, analyzed: "In terms of farming scale alone, there are still many places across the country suitable for shrimp farming, and the area may be larger than Qianjiang. But the key to the development of the crayfish industry lies in core technology. Whoever masters the core technology masters the commanding heights of crayfish industry development. We must speed up the construction of standardized, large-scale, intensive and modern crayfish improved breed selection and expansion bases, guide enterprises to find their positioning, base themselves on the long term, focus on the seed industry, and shift limited technology, capital and talent resources more toward seedling cultivation research and development."
Hu Gongmin said that the 7th Hubei (Qianjiang) Crayfish Festival will be held in Qianjiang from June 12 to 16. Through festival activities and media dissemination, the brand effect of Qianjiang crayfish will be further expanded, letting "Qianjiang crayfish" go to the whole country and even the world. (Our reporters He Hongwei and Le Mingkai)