Ecological laying hen farming opens the door to prosperity for farmers

Every morning at 6 o'clock, Wang Xingfen, a villager from Mengbang Village, Yangwu Township, Xixiu District, wakes up to the sound of roosters crowing. At dawn, while preparing chicken feed, she goes to the places where the laying hens like to lay eggs to collect them. On May 22, she collected 50 native eggs. Looking at these eggs of varying sizes, she happily calculated in her mind: in just over a month, these laying hens will enter their peak production period, and by then she will have an income of two to three hundred yuan per day.

Wang Xingfen's household is one of 20 ecological laying hen farming households in Yangwu Township. In April of this year, Wang Xingfen and her husband made up their minds to follow Anshun Xinwang Livestock and Poultry Breeding Company and take up ecological laying hen farming. Yangwu Township, using the "company + cooperative + farmer" industrial driving model, through poverty alleviation projects, subsidizes each ecological laying hen farming household with 20,000 yuan for building chicken coops and purchasing chicks. At Wang Xingfen's farming base, the reporter saw rows of "chicken villas" built on the green grass, white laying hens leisurely searching for bugs under plum trees. With one call from the owner, thousands of laying hens rush over from all directions, waiting for the owner to feed them delicious food.

"My family's laying hens have just started laying eggs, so some of these eggs are as small as pigeon eggs, but these first eggs are very nutritious." Wang Xingfen said to the reporter while collecting eggs. Her family raised 1,500 laying hens this year, covering 8 mu of land. One "chicken villa" can hold 270 chickens. After 120 days of raising, they enter the egg-laying period, which can last 300 to 500 days. "The eggs laid by farmers' free-range native chickens are purchased by the agricultural professional cooperative at 9 jiao per egg, then uniformly transported to Anshun Xinwang Livestock and Poultry Breeding Company, where the company uniformly packages them and sells them at 1.5 yuan per egg. After the egg-laying period is over, the company also purchases laying hens that no longer lay eggs at 15 yuan per jin. Farmers can earn money from selling chickens while also earning money from eggs." said Fu Shixiong, deputy township head of the township.

In order to achieve standardized and large-scale farming, Yangwu Township implements "five unifications" management for ecological laying hens, namely unified feed (corn) supply, unified seedling breeding, unified technical guidance, unified disinfection and epidemic prevention, and unified recycling. Regular professional farming training is carried out weekly to improve the professional level of farming households. According to Fu Shixiong, at present, ecological laying hen farming in Yangwu Township has just started. By the peak production period of the laying hens, 8,000 to 9,000 native eggs will be produced every day. Through targeted poverty alleviation by developing ecological laying hen farming, a portion of poor farming households can be lifted out of poverty. One year later, the 20 poor households developing laying hen farming will achieve a per capita annual net income of over 10,000 yuan.