Chen Erxia Gets Rich Raising Sheep: From City Fruit Girl to Sheep-Raising Expert

Chen Erxia, chairwoman of the Shengyuan Tibetan Goat Breeding Professional Cooperative in Xiangshui County, a "Star of Returning Home to Start a Business" in Yancheng City, was honored by the State Council as a National Outstanding Migrant Worker on February 1 this year, and was a provincial model worker in 2016.

In March 2013, she was awarded the title of "Star of Returning Home to Start a Business" by the Yancheng City Human Resources and Social Security Bureau; in April 2014, she was rated as one of the "Top Ten Pacesetters in Returning Home to Start a Business" by the county party committee and county government; in May 2014, she was awarded the "Youth Wealth-Building Project Demonstration Base" by the Xiangshui County Youth League Committee; in 2015, she was rated as one of the county's "Top Ten Outstanding Women" by the county women's federation.

Bidding Farewell to the Big City, Decisively Returning Home to Expand the Path of Entrepreneurship

Chen Erxia, 34, is from Shuanggang, Xiangshui. Fifteen years ago, when she was only 19, she went alone to make her way in the big city of Shanghai, waiting tables and selling fruit. After more than a decade of hard work, she bought a house and a car in Shanghai, and everything was going smoothly. But she was a person with a strong will by nature. Having grown up in the vast countryside, she felt the noisy big city did not quite suit her, and she always wanted to expand into a bigger space for development.

In 2012, Chen Erxia returned to her hometown of Dongwu Village for the Spring Festival. It happened that this year the provincial poverty alleviation task force was setting up a poverty alleviation demonstration site in the village, and there was a black goat breeding project that needed someone to lead it. She looked up information and found that black goats have strong disease resistance, low feeding costs, and guaranteed sales channels, so she took the initiative to approach them and talked about her plan to return home to start a business. She received strong support, and the task force promised to lend her an interest-free loan of 100,000 yuan.

Her old father, who had spent a lifetime dealing with livestock in the countryside, was very worried: "'Monkey sheep' are the hardest to tend. You have no experience, and no background either. How can a girl like you raise sheep?"

"Who says women are inferior to men?" While working on her father's thinking, Chen Erxia decisively handed over her Shanghai business to someone else to manage. Right after the Spring Festival, she bought more than 200 black goats from Shandong in one go and was the first in the village to start raising them.

Facing Hardship Head-On, Accumulating Experience and Extending the Industry Chain

But things did not go as hoped. Just one week after the black goats entered the pen, they began dying for no apparent reason. After a postmortem examination, it turned out they had all been injected with water, and the deaths were directly related to this. Within two months, half had died, the losses were severe, and gossip followed one after another. Chen Erxia refused to accept defeat and began to think calmly. During the day she cleaned up the sheep pen and buried the dead goats; at night she read books and went online to learn about black goat breeding. While learning, she paid great attention to practice, often squatting in the sheep pen for hours at a time, raising while learning and applying what she learned. She spent the first cold Spring Festival of her breeding career in the sheep pen together with the sheep.

In just a few years, Chen Erxia went from an "outsider" to a widely known "expert."

Giving Play to Her Progressive Role, Helping the Poor and Needy to Draw a Picture of Moderate Prosperity Together

In order to reduce breeding risks, she bought insurance for all the sheep she had just purchased. After solving the problem, she decided to expand the scale of breeding. She went to a neighboring town, rented 200 mu of riverside grassland, bought another batch of black goats, and with the help of the poverty alleviation task force built the Shengyuan Tibetan Goat Farm. By the second half of the year, 500 ewes had given birth to more than 1,800 lambs, and her sheep-raising project entered a virtuous cycle.

In the process of starting her business, Chen Erxia did not forget to help her fellow villagers get rich together. She collected a list of poor households with able-bodied or partially able-bodied laborers in several surrounding towns and districts, then went door to door to explain the benefits of the "company plus farmers" sheep-raising model: during operation, the company buys back at a high price, guaranteeing the farmers' interests. With the help of the poverty alleviation task force, she also twice invited experts from Yangzhou University to give free centralized instruction on breeding techniques to sheep-raising households.

Now, the number of goats raised has grown from only more than 200 at the time to more than 2,000 today, with more than 1,000 head on hand; the number of sheep-raising households has grown from just a few at the beginning to more than 120 in the surrounding area, and farmers have become rich by raising sheep. Zhao Jin of Caogang Village, who has a slight leg disability and could not find anyone willing to hire him even for migrant work, was still a bachelor at 36. After Chen Erxia accepted him as a member of the sheep-raising cooperative, she repeatedly taught him breeding experience and gave 32 vaccinated lambs to Zhao Jin and his father to raise. In just two and a half years, the Zhao family earned more than 100,000 yuan. Not only did they renovate their house, but Zhao Jin also found a girlfriend and is preparing to get married this Spring Festival.