A remarkable man returns home to start a business, striking gold in the deep mountains
This bull has a fierce temper; several young men can't hold it back. The more it fights, the more people love it, and the buyers are all the more fond of it for this. He left the mountains and became a boss with an annual income of ten million yuan, yet now he insists on coming back to lead farming households in striking gold together. He also discovered that a fortune of a million lies hidden in cow dung. See how Yang Fei of Qingchuan County, Sichuan Province, found wealth in a remote mountain area.
His name is Yang Fei. Today he is going to sell this bull, but he had just put a rope on the bull and taken only two steps when the bull flew into a rage.
Yang Fei: Look, look, it's lost its temper. It's digging its feet into the ground. It's about to attack.
Reporter: Where?
Yang Fei: It wants to attack now. If we go in, it will attack us one hundred percent. It might knock you to the ground and then trample you with its feet, that's for sure. This is a 2000-jin bull, look.
This bull is always looking for a chance to attack. Yang Fei can't help but worry, so he has the workers put on another rope, but even so, as soon as this bull leaves its pen, its aggression shows.
On the scene: No, no.
A bull close to 2000 jin bolts at full speed, dragging several young men over 200 m, and they can only follow behind its rear looking for a chance to subdue it. Using this tree, they finally steady the running bull down. In the end, Yang Fei still uses the traditional method of threading a rope through the bull's nose to deal with this troublesome bull. Although this method has some effect, the bull is still full of bullheadedness. Nobody dares to force it, so they can only go along with the bull's temper and advance slowly. Five people worked for a full half hour before they finally got this bull onto the scale. Although everyone was exhausted by this bull, the buyer likes this kind of bull even more, and selling this bull for over twenty thousand yuan is no problem.
Beef cattle dealer He Ansheng: This one has had exercise, so the more a bull is like this, the more willing we are to buy it, and the price is a bit higher compared with others.
Yang Fei: The happiest thing about raising cattle is the day you sell them. Once it's weighed today, the money will be paid and the renminbi will be in my hands. I'm so happy.
Yang Fei's annual sales from raising cattle are over 6 million yuan, which makes the villagers envious, but for Yang Fei, this 6 million yuan in sales is much smaller than his gas pipeline installation business in Guangdong. What is even harder to understand is that Yang Fei built his cattle farm on this remote mountain at the junction of three provinces, which is not a very good choice.
Yang Fei: Site selection for raising cattle is extremely important: water access, road access, electricity access. We have none of these here. No water access, no road access, no electricity access.
Yang Fei is a boss with entrepreneurial experience. Since he clearly knew how difficult it would be to build a cattle farm here, why did he give up a business in Guangdong earning ten million a year and return to the mountains of Sichuan Province to become a cattle herder?
At the age of 22, Yang Fei left the mountains with borrowed travel money and struggled in Guangdong for more than 20 years, starting as a laborer on a construction site, and later founding his own gas pipeline installation company with an annual income of over ten million. In 2009, Yang Fei handed over the Guangdong business to his younger brother to manage, and planned to return home himself, investing 6 million yuan to build a cattle farm on the mountain. The whole family opposed it.
Wife Ouyang Ruizhi: The costs here are several times higher. I said you've invested so much money, when will you get it back?
Older sister Yang Cuiying: You've already gotten out, and now you still want to come back to this place, it's so hard, and the place is so remote.
Yang Fei had long ago brought his parents and siblings to Guangdong, and the family lived very happily. The family could not understand why he wanted to return to that remote little mountain village to raise cattle. The family knew better than anyone that the mountain road to the village used to be all dirt road, winding and steep, and in bad weather mudslides and landslides often happened, with danger liable to strike at any time.
Wife Ouyang Ruizhi: One time I thought that car had gone off under the cliff, and my heart suddenly felt pressed down by a big stone, and tears came out right then. I just felt the conditions here were bad, and I didn't want him to come here.
Yang Fei and his wife had discussed everything together for years, but this time even his wife's persuasion did not work. Yang Fei advanced steadily step by step. After deciding in 2009 to raise cattle, for the sake of safety he did not rush to carry it out. Instead, he first returned to Mianyang City and started another gas pipeline installation company. Holding on to the idea of raising cattle, Yang Fei investigated for three years, because he knew that from an investment perspective, this was not a good business.
Yang Fei: I still have many friends who came and said I'd gone crazy. You're raising cattle on this mountain, what kind of cattle are you raising, they said. The money has nowhere to go, they said to you.
During the interview in April 2016, when Yang Fei took the reporter up the mountain, the reporter personally felt how rugged and difficult the mountain road here is. It is still like this today, so one can imagine how bad the road conditions were before. So Yang Fei's investment on the mountain at that time was so unreasonable. What exactly was he after? Why did he insist on choosing that site for the cattle farm?
In fact, this is related to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. After the earthquake, Yang Fei and his wife returned to their long-absent hometown to visit relatives. Yang Fei had nowhere to stay, so he stayed at a neighbor's house. One small thing after another warmed Yang Fei's heart.
Yang Fei: After I came back, the villagers killed chickens and ducks for you to eat. They could sell them for about one hundred yuan, and for their family that might be enough to buy cooking oil and salt for a month. That is to say, even eating one of their chickens made me uncomfortable. If I can help get things going, then even if he brings me a bottle of good liquor, I'd be willing to drink it.
Yang Fei got the idea of returning home to start a business because he saw that the lives the villagers lived had not improved much compared with when he left more than ten years earlier. From chatting with friends his own age, Yang Fei learned that at over forty years old they were in an awkward position: working away from home was becoming harder and harder to endure, but if they wanted to return home they were afraid they could not make money. Yang Fei really wanted to help them.
Yang Fei: I said, if I come back and do something here, would you welcome it? They welcomed it very much, every one of them had a very welcoming gesture, and that look in their eyes was like a child seeing candy, all drooling. Wow, at that time that feeling in my heart immediately moved me.
Yang Fei figured that what the mountain in the village lacked least was forage, so raising cattle was very suitable. But before raising cattle, Yang Fei did not dare to be careless either, and instead went around visiting and learning.
Yang Fei: If someone raised ten cattle, I went to learn about it. If you raised one hundred cattle, I went to learn about it. If you raised one thousand, I went to learn about it. The largest farm raising ten thousand cattle, I went to see it. In the end I summed up the experience.
Widening the road surface, bringing in water and running electricity, Yang Fei step by step turned what others saw as impossible into reality. In 2011, Yang Fei invested more than 6 million yuan and built a cattle farm on the mountain. Building a farm on the mountain cost two or three times as much as building on flat ground, but Yang Fei never flinched. After the cattle farm was built in 2011, Yang Fei first bought more than a dozen cattle of different breeds from Jinan City, Shandong Province, to try raising them. As for raising cattle, Yang Fei was a complete layman. In order to figure out the cattle's habits, Yang Fei stayed with the cattle every day. When his wife woke up in the middle of the night, she often could not find Yang Fei.
Wife Ouyang Ruizhi: I got up to see where he had gone, and I saw that the lights in the cattle farm were on, and then he had run off to the cattle farm to see the cattle.