Pig farmer Shang Wang: The Pig Commander Who Turned His Dream into Reality
Shang Wang, from Xing Shenggong Village, Huaishuo Town, Guyang County, Baotou City, is a well-known "Pig Commander" in the Guyang area. Years ago, he gave up a corporate executive job with an annual salary of 300,000 yuan, resolutely resigned, and returned to his hometown to start a breeding farm. Shang Wang said his dream was to return to the village to help his fellow villagers escape poverty and become prosperous, and to change the backward face of his hometown.
His enterprise has successively received honorary titles such as "Baotou City Contract-Honoring and Trustworthy Unit," "Key Leading Enterprise in Agricultural and Livestock Industrialization," "Outstanding Characteristic Breeding Park," "Outstanding Migrant Worker Return-to-Hometown Entrepreneurship Park of the Autonomous Region," and "National Science and Technology Demonstration Park." Shang Wang himself has also been awarded the honorary titles of "National Outstanding Migrant Worker" and "National Model Worker."
◆ A flower seed of a dream in his heart
In just a few short years, Shang Wang's Ha Nong Farm Wild Boar Breeding Park has accumulated an investment of nearly 6 million yuan. The main park covers about 800 mu and can accommodate 500 wild boars, with an annual cyclic production capacity of 5,000-10,000 wild boars, and it has successfully driven a group of farmers to raise wild boars.
In 1993, after being discharged from the military, Shang Wang went to Guangzhou to work. By 2006, at the age of 35, he was already able to earn an annual salary of 300,000 yuan. Seeing the developed township enterprises and the affluent lives of farmers in the south, Shang Wang thought of his own hometown. In the spring of 2006, he went to Yunnan on a business trip and unexpectedly discovered a new pig breed. After that, he paid attention everywhere, using the spare time on each business trip to investigate wild boar breeding and market conditions in different places. A year later, carrying a dream buried in his heart for more than 20 years, Shang Wang gave up that high-paying job and returned to his hometown to begin raising wild boars with his own wisdom and hard work. But this met with opposition from his whole family. They said, "You already have such a high monthly salary in the south, and your life is already good. Why throw the money you have earned into this poor mountain village?" Even with his family disapproving, he steeled himself and was determined to make wild boar farming a success.
In 2007, Guyang County happened to begin a county-wide grazing ban, and Shang Wang was determined to seize this opportunity. He presented his ideas to the leaders of Huaishuo Town and received strong support from the town Party committee and government. Just like that, he invested 300,000 yuan for the first time and began building pig sheds and buying piglets to establish Guyang County's first wild boar breeding farm.
In order to better master breeding experience and techniques, he bought all kinds of books and materials on scientific wild boar raising, consulted local veterinarians and experts from agricultural and livestock departments, and studied hard on his own, gradually acquiring the ability to raise wild boars. When the wild boar sows gave birth, Shang Wang would go to the pig sheds more than a dozen times every night to check on them, and it was common for him to collapse onto a wooden chair to sleep when he was tired. As his wild boar breeding business grew bigger and stronger, Shang Wang also added large, excellent purebred boars for mating and purchased large numbers of fine purebred wild boar piglets in bulk... and the scale of wild boar breeding continued to expand.
◆ Sprouting Strongly Without Fear of Wind and Rain
But just when Shang Wang was preparing to go all out, something he never expected happened, and for a time it made him want to give up the idea of raising wild boars.
In 2008, Shang Wang's parents passed away one after another, and problems also appeared at the wild boar farm. Because at the beginning he had not considered that temperatures could change suddenly and had not prepared warm pens for the wild boars in advance, large numbers of wild boars died in winter. During the period when his parents were hospitalized for treatment, he also spent more than 500,000 yuan of his savings. At that point, not to mention buying wild boar piglets, he did not even have money to buy charcoal to keep the pigs warm. That was the coldest winter of his life. After learning of the situation, leaders from Guyang County and Huaishuo Town came many times to visit and comfort Shang Wang. They repeatedly encouraged him to continue raising wild boars and gave him 20,000 yuan in Party member assistance funds.
Facing the heavy snow drifting outside, Shang Wang's frozen heart began to warm slowly. He then used the 20,000 yuan in assistance funds to buy 20 tons of coal to keep the wild boars warm, and only then were the remaining more than 100 wild boars saved from freezing to death. Shang Wang said that this 20,000 yuan was truly timely help, a life-saving sum given to him by the Party organization, and along with the help from his fellow villagers, it was what allowed him to have what he has today. In this way, he made up his mind not only not to give up breeding but to make it bigger and stronger, in order to repay the people who cared about him.
◆ The Flower of Dream Blossoms Here
Now, when people walk into Shang Wang's Ha Nong Farm Wild Boar Breeding Park, from far away they can hear the loud songs played through loudspeakers in the wild boar pens. This is the music-feeding method he adopted for the wild boars. In the feed processing workshop, large feed processing machines rumble, and workers are busy, some processing, some mixing special wild boar feed, and some installing household colorful radiators... Each wild boar lives very "comfortably."
Shang Wang has successively completed the basic construction of the wild boar breeding base and the large-scale production of wild boars, and has streamlined and expanded sales channels, gradually embarking on a stable development path of scientific breeding, ecological domestication, and green environmental protection. The breeding park has now accumulated an investment of nearly 6 million yuan. In 2011 alone, it sold more than 1,500 special wild boars and achieved a profit of more than 1.4 million yuan. At present, this wild boar breeding park covers about 800 mu, can accommodate 500 wild boars, and has an annual cyclic production capacity of 5,000-10,000 wild boars.
What is even more encouraging is that Shang Wang has now successfully driven more than 150 farming households around his hometown to raise wild boars. In order to expand sales, in 2009 Shang Wang sold wild boar meat to several hotels in Guyang and Baotou, earning a net profit of 200,000 yuan in one go. Media outlets including central, autonomous region, and city-level ones all reported on it one after another, making Shang Wang's wild boar meat even more in short supply. Under Shang Wang's influence, more and more farmers followed him in raising wild boars. He wants to lead his fellow villagers to raise wild boars like him, make money, and become prosperous. For villagers in distant places who raise wild boars but have no experience and do not understand the techniques, Shang Wang provides technical training free of charge at the breeding park and regularly goes deep into the homes of breeding households to give on-site guidance. For farmers and herdsmen who have the conditions for breeding and pass the training, piglets are given priority for seasonal trial breeding.
Through years of effort, the breeding park now has a group of breeding wild boars including Yunnan wild boars, southern Shaanxi wild boars, Changbai Mountain wild boars, and Sichuan wild boars. They implement a "company + park + farmer" production and operation model, sign wild boar contract-breeding and buyback contracts with breeding households, and clarify the basic buyback price. Through market research, they take into account both high-end consumption and star-rated catering hotels as well as low-end consumers, stabilizing market prices. With this good model, the breeding scale of the park has grown larger and larger. In addition, because the wild boar feeding formula is scientific, the quality of the wild boar meat is also well guaranteed, and the economic benefits for breeding households have continued to improve. Now, Shang Wang's breeding park has become the wild boar domestication and breeding base park with the most complete varieties, the highest strain quality, and the largest scale in western Inner Mongolia.
Good news came again in 2015: Shang Wang is preparing to attract several major projects from the south to settle in Baotou Jinshan Industrial Park. If successful, these projects will be able to invest 1.4 billion yuan here, and this time alone can provide jobs for more than 2,000 migrant workers who have come to the city for work.