Sika deer breeding and processing give a remote village a clever path to prosperity

Original title: Li Weifeng: Raising deer blazes a trail to prosperity

The sika deer raised by Li Weifeng (web image: Tianzhong Evening News)

Zhangzhao Village, Donghedian Town, Pingyu County, Henan Province, is a remote and poor village located at the junction of Henan and Anhui provinces. Since the beginning of this year, after Zhangzhao Village was included in Pingyu County's targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty eradication plan, the story of local villager Li Weifeng getting rich by raising deer became known. When talk turned to raising deer, this honest, down-to-earth farmer with an impressive way of speaking immediately opened up.

Li Weifeng, now 33 years old, graduated from a vocational school and is a knowledge-minded farmer. In 2006, with his family's help and guidance, he began learning the building materials business, and then in 2008 he opened a large building materials store in Miaocha Town, Linquan, Anhui, adjacent to his hometown. Business grew better and better, and profits were quite substantial. In 2010, Li Weifeng unintentionally developed a strong interest in deer, an animal unfamiliar to him. Whenever he had free time, he went online to search for and study related knowledge and information: deer, it turned out, were treasured from head to toe, and moreover, they could be raised in his hometown too. As a result, the idea of raising deer at home began to take root and sprout in his heart.

When Li Weifeng told his family about the idea of raising deer, his wife Tian Weiping was very supportive, but his father strongly opposed it. His conservative-minded father thought his idea was too unreliable, and that it would surely drag down his perfectly good building materials business.

Stubborn by nature, Li Weifeng was set on the path of raising deer. In 2013, with the help of the village Party branch secretary, he and a friend jointly bought an idle cattle farm opposite the village committee and carried out preliminary renovations, and obtained a "National Key Protected Wild Animal Domestication and Breeding License." During this period, he also spent 3 months studying on site at a deer farm in Beijing. At the end of that year, Li Weifeng introduced the first batch of sika deer from Beijing: 1 breeding stag, 15 does, and 4 production deer. The 20 deer cost a full 200,000 yuan, and what was most distressing was that due to long-distance transport and more than 20 hours of bumping along the road, plus the cold and windy weather at the time, within just two months of the 20 deer "settling" in his hometown, 5 died one after another! The partner therefore withdrew his investment. Li Weifeng felt unprecedented pressure. For this reason, he successively took out more than a million yuan from the building materials store.

In 2014, the does successfully gave birth to 11 fawns. The first crop of velvet antler "contributed" by the production deer was all bought at high prices by local people doing business elsewhere who returned home for the Spring Festival, which strengthened Li Weifeng's belief in getting rich by raising deer. In 2015, he invested an additional more than 400,000 yuan, built a new feed workshop and warehouse, installed a complete set of new feed production equipment, launched a new silage processing technique, and also planted sweet elephant grass, barley grass and other crops that sika deer like to eat, and formally registered and established Pingyu County Wanlu Deer Industry Company. In the same year, the does successfully gave birth to another 8 fawns, all of which survived and grew well; moreover, the 11 fawns self-bred the previous year had already begun producing velvet antler. Through Li Weifeng's exploration, he also developed products such as deer blood wine, velvet antler wine, and deer placenta paste, sold through the internet and physical stores, with people from dozens to a hundred li around constantly coming to buy, and demand exceeding supply.

At present, Li Weifeng's company has entered a stage of steady and healthy development, and the deer herd has increased to 34. Since 2014, Li Weifeng has harvested and sold more than 20 kg of velvet antler, brewed and sold a total of more than 1,000 kg of deer blood (velvet antler) wine, and produced and sold more than 100 packets of deer placenta paste. The actual income brought by raising deer has already reached several hundred thousand yuan. Right now, the pregnant does are about to give birth, and more than 10 fawns are expected to be added; Li Weifeng will also soon introduce two high-quality breeding stags and more than 15 breeding does from Northeast China, to ensure that within 3~5 years the total deer herd reaches more than 300. "The company's various infrastructure facilities are being newly built and expanded, and we plan to introduce artificial breeding, deep product processing and other techniques and equipment within the year, to make the necessary preparations for gradually achieving large-scale deer raising and industrialized production of deer products in the future," Li Weifeng said happily.

It is worth mentioning that Li Weifeng is willing to do his utmost for the village's implementation of targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty eradication. To help fellow villagers escape poverty and become prosperous, Li Weifeng decided to explore the establishment of a deer-raising professional cooperative within the year, and worked out the basic idea and support model of "company + cooperative + farming households": that is, with the company as the backing, the cooperative as the platform, and the premise of zero investment and zero risk for the masses, distributing to individual households to raise fawns and young deer in a free-range manner, implementing unified management, unified feed supply, unified epidemic prevention, unified sales, as well as unified training plus on-site guidance, unified settlement plus year-end dividends, and so on. (Wen Zeke, our reporter Zhang Peiqi)