Woman pig farmer leads her fellow villagers toward moderate prosperity
"Breeding training is held right in the pig pens, so it goes into your ears, your brain and your heart!" said Sun Fangxia, a pig farmer. On March 30, at the breeding pig farm of Yongmei Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Technical Service Company in Fengtai County, Sun Duomei (left) was giving local fellow villagers a free lesson on spring pig disease prevention.
Sun Duomei, a worker laid off from her job, went from running a fruit stall to trying her hand at pig farming, all for one goal: to leave poverty behind! From a few piglets to becoming a leader with a farm of 10,000 pigs, from an obscure ordinary farmer to a star entrepreneur. After achieving prosperity, Sun Duomei thought more about how to help farming households across the surrounding villages get rich together. She founded the "Huainan Chunlu Pig Farming Professional Cooperative", adopting a "cooperative + farmers + base" model that drove the surrounding farming households toward shared prosperity. "Whenever a farmer lacks funds or skills for pig farming, she always comes to their door to help," said Liu Lu, a farming household. Over the years, Sun Duomei has delivered feed to farmers' doors on credit, letting farmers short of funds and skills raise the pigs first and pay later, giving them piglets to try raising and payment after the pigs are sent to market, and bringing skills to their doors, teaching farmers hand-in-hand how to raise pigs, prevent disease and treat illness, helping them walk the road of shared prosperity; the more than 260 pig farmers she leads each earn an annual income of over 100,000 yuan. Over the past few years, Sun Duomei has every year paid out of her own pocket to invite experts and professors from provincial, municipal and county animal husbandry departments and large pig farms to hold training courses on new pig farming techniques, holding more than 70 sessions in total and training more than 15,000 person-times free of charge.
Sun Duomei has successively won honors including "Anhui Province March 8th Red Banner Pacesetter", "Anhui Province Double Study and Double Comparison Woman Expert" and "Anhui Province Women's Entrepreneurship Star", and in March this year she was named a "National March 8th Red Banner Pacesetter".