Pig Farming and Winemaking Set Shuicheng County, Guizhou on the Road to Prosperity

Zhang Min is making wine.

Every morning at six, Zhang Min, a villager from Group 5 of Yangmei Village in Yangmei Township, Shuicheng County, gets up on time, lights the fire, places the vat, scoops water…… and gets ready to start making wine. After processes such as selecting the ingredients, steaming, saccharification, fermentation, sterilisation and distillation, mellow corn wine flows slowly out of the vat.

This farmhouse corn wine, brewed by a traditional rural method, uses the locally abundant corn as its main raw material and clear, sweet mountain spring water, and the finished wine has a high alcohol content. Drinking it and swallowing it gives a burning sensation, and it is an indispensable courtesy for entertaining guests in farming families.

On May 13, a reporter visited Zhang Min's winemaking workshop and saw that it has no mechanical equipment at all, and every step of the winemaking process is done by hand. Meeting Zhang Min for the first time, she seemed a little shy and not very talkative. But when it came to winemaking, she felt very proud: “My parents' family also made wine, and I learned to make wine when I was in my early teens.”

Zhang Min told the reporter that, according to the characteristics of the winemaking process, generally one day is for steaming the grain and one day is for drawing off the wine, and all the work is done by her and her husband. Traditional winemaking is physical labour and very tiring, especially in summer, when the freshly steamed corn is steaming hot at extremely high temperatures and the whole workshop is very stuffy.

In 2006, with her business sense, she raised 20,000 yuan and bought 30 piglets to start raising livestock. Every day, the piglets' feed consumed large amounts of the family's corn, potatoes and other grain, leaving the family, which was not well off to begin with, rather short of money. She thought of her winemaking skill, and why not use the distiller's grains produced by winemaking, which could both solve the feed problem and bring in another income. She acted at once, and that year she built a simple winemaking workshop, and kept at it for 10 years.

“My wine is never adulterated and has a pure taste. It is all acquaintances who come to my door to buy wine, so I have no worries about sales.” Zhang Min said while making wine, “Every year I need 2,400 jin of corn, which can produce 1,000 jin of wine, at an average price of about 4 yuan per jin.”

Next to the winemaking workshop is a simple pigpen shaped like the character "seven," built from cement bricks, with 20 sows sleeping quietly inside. “The 20 sows gave birth to 130 piglets this year, more than 70 were sold, and there are still more than 50 in the pen now.” Zhang Min said, “Last year the market for adult pigs was good, so I raised adult pigs; this year the market for piglets is good, so I raise piglets. I raise pigs according to the market.”

Lei Minglin, deputy head of Yangmei Township, who accompanied the reporter on the interview, said that Zhang Min is a “capable woman” who not only knows how to make wine, but also how to give injections to pigs.

Zhang Min said somewhat shyly that in the countryside in the past, whenever a pig got sick, it was hard to find a veterinarian, and by the time one was found to treat the pig, the illness had already become serious, and she had to spend a large sum on medical fees. To reduce expenses, she bought some books on pig breeding and disease prevention at a bookshop and taught herself to treat pigs.

“In recent years, Zhang Min has never asked anyone to treat her pigs; she always treats and injects them herself.” Lei Minglin said. All along, the relevant officials of the township and village have cared greatly about Zhang Min's entrepreneurship and have repeatedly encouraged her to expand the scale of her breeding operation. In 2014, the village also helped her apply for a two-year government interest-subsidised loan to support her in expanding the scale of her breeding operation.

Pig farming and winemaking have set Zhang Min's family on the road to prosperity. Last year, her family earned more than 100,000 yuan from selling adult pigs and more than 100,000 yuan from winemaking. This year, in both winemaking and pig farming, Zhang Min's family has had another bumper year.