Egg Duck Farming King Zhang Yongyi Leads Villagers onto the Road to Prosperity
A farmer's son born and raised in the countryside, he pursued his entrepreneurial dream in his hometown. Starting from his family's small native chicken hatchery of just over ten square meters, he has grown to raise more than 1 million laying ducks with an annual output value of 180 million yuan. His company, operating on a company-plus-farmers model, is a provincial-level leading enterprise in agricultural industrialization integrating egg duck farming, poultry egg purchasing and sales, deep processing of egg products, and feed processing and sales. He is Zhang Yongyi, a young farmer from Ketan Town, Lujiang County, and a 2015 National Model Worker.
Finding the Road to Prosperity Through Duck Farming
In 1999, Zhang Yongyi returned home after graduating from high school and helped his father run the native chicken hatchery. He happened to hear people say that egg duck farming in a neighboring county was booming. Thinking of how rural areas were encouraging agricultural restructuring, he pondered carefully: wasn't his hometown's backward breeding industry a field full of promise? Zhang Yongyi scraped together 30,000 yuan and built the area's first duck shed on his family's vacant land, introducing improved-breed laying ducklings, and made a profit of over 10,000 yuan that year. Having had a taste of success, Zhang Yongyi gained even more confidence, and the following year he built two more duck sheds, embarking from then on a road to prosperity through industrialization.
Seeing that his fellow villagers were still fumbling along the road to prosperity, in 2000 Zhang Yongyi guided 5 farming households in his village group to raise laying ducks. In 2002 he took the lead in establishing the county's laying duck farming association, unreservedly passing on new techniques and new experience to more than 220 members, and each year advancing more than 2 million yuan in production costs for people struggling with startup funds.
A demonstration farming community capable of raising 100,000 laying ducks was established in 2007, and Zhang Yongyi set up a laying duck professional cooperative, building a stable production-supply-marketing chain mechanism with more than 300 local farming households through order-based production or profit rebates. He also raised funds to introduce advanced domestic equipment and founded an egg deep-processing enterprise with an annual output of 800 tons of vacuum-packed salted duck eggs, 600 tons of preserved duck eggs, and 50 tons of salted egg yolks.
On the morning of April 22, 2016, farmer Liu Mingcheng from Xiaodun Village drove over more than 8,000 duck eggs and hauled away 8 tons of feed. “The laying duck cooperative provides the feed, and the farmers are responsible for raising the ducks well and delivering the duck eggs.” Liu Mingcheng said happily, “I raise 10,000 ducks and earn an annual income of 200,000 yuan.”
For more than a decade, Zhang Yongyi has consistently provided duck farmers with free services of “unified ingredients, unified breed introduction, unified buyback, and unified immunization”, inviting university professors and experts to serve as consultants, and has held a total of 26 lectures on laying duck farming and epidemic prevention techniques, benefiting more than 2,000 farmer visits and leading farming households onto a broad road to prosperity through breeding.
(Yuan Bing)