A university student from Xuancheng returns home to become a pig herder, building a new "Internet + black pig" brand
While many rural kids jump out of the farm gate, wanting to carve out their own piece of the world in the city, university student Wang Xiaohui plunged right back into the countryside to become a "pig herder." Three years on, the Jinlvyuan Ecological Breeding Farm founded by Wang Xiaohui has successfully raised "Jingzhou Black Iron" (commonly known as Jixi black pig), a nationally protected livestock and poultry germplasm resource breed, and he has established Jixi County Taoshi No. 1 E-Commerce Co., Ltd., with an annual output value of more than 5 million yuan, ranking among the county-level leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization. He was also named an outstanding entrepreneurial youth of Jixi County.
Last summer, Wang Xiaohui's entrepreneurial story drew the attention of provincial media.
A chance opportunity sparked the idea of raising "Jingzhou Black Iron"
Wang Xiaohui was born in 1990 in Wufengpo Village, Jinsha Town, Jixi County. In July 2012, after graduating from Anhui Technical College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, he was hired by an Internet company in Wuhu as a network administrator, earning a monthly salary of more than 2,000 yuan.
On one chance occasion, Wang Xiaohui saw in a display case at a local supermarket a kind of ecological black pork selling for as much as fifty or sixty yuan per jin, and the salesperson said it sold very well, which greatly astonished him. He immediately thought of a breed in his hometown called "Jixi black pig," also known as "Jingzhou Black Iron." "The price of black pigs is so good, raising black pigs is sure to make money. Could I open a farm specifically for raising black pigs?"
When this " baffling" bold idea suddenly popped into his head, he was startled even by himself. He thought, could pork this expensive really be better than what my family raises in the countryside? So whenever he had free time, he frantically searched online for information about these high-priced pigs. In the end he discovered that these pigs that could fetch high prices all shared one thing in common: they were all fairly famous local native pigs, raised free-range on farms, fed coarse grains, and with a rearing cycle several months longer than ordinary commercial pigs.
Afterward, Wang Xiaohui made a survey form and used his spare time to conduct market research. Through the survey, he reached a conclusion: as people's living standards improve, the public's requirements for pork quality also rise, shifting from the past subsistence type to the nutritious, functional, green and healthy type. "The pork on the market now is all white pigs that are quickly sent to slaughter in about 4 months, so the taste and texture of the meat are bound to have flaws." After comparison, Wang Xiaohui concluded that the prospects for original ecological farming were excellent. The idea of becoming a "pig herder" in his heart grew stronger and stronger.
With a bold drive to venture forth, he quit his job and went home to raise pigs
During the 2013 Spring Festival, Wang Xiaohui, who had returned home for the holiday, told his parents about the market conditions for ecological black pigs and his idea of going home to raise black pigs. Unexpectedly, his father, who had worked for many years as a live pig broker, fully supported him, encouraging him to boldly do it, and to do it as well as possible.
With his family's support, Wang Xiaohui was full of confidence. He quit his job in Wuhu and returned to his hometown, the Wufengpo villager group of No. 38 Bridge Village, Jinsha Town, Jixi County, to set up a pig farm together with his parents. Previously, the family had already transferred more than 100 mu of mountain land in a mountain hollow locally called "Qiankengwu" to develop an economic forest, and now it was just right for free-range raising black pigs in this mountain hollow.
Father and son raised several hundred thousand yuan, built roads, put up power lines, channeled water down from the mountain, and put up simple pig sheds. In May 2013, they introduced 100 purebred black sows and 4 black breeding boars from the Jixi black pig conservation areas of Jiapeng and Jingzhou, and formally founded the "Jixi County Jinlvyuan Ecological Breeding Professional Cooperative."
In order to learn the techniques well, Wang Xiaohui also deliberately enrolled in the animal medicine major at Anhui Agricultural University, studying breeding techniques hard, and when busy, shuttling between the farm and the university. At the same time, he cleverly used local original ecological resources and adopted a unique "new breeding method": mainly local black pigs and native chickens, raised free-range in deep mountains, with a rearing cycle of more than a year and a half, fed coarse grains and weeds, and drinking clear spring water from the mountains. This new breeding model ensures the purity of the products.
Gradually, as the scale expanded, he encountered a capital "bottleneck." Just then, a helping hand reached out to this university student "pig herder." The Xuancheng Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau even gave him a 200,000-yuan low-interest entrepreneurial loan in one go, encouraging him to grow bigger and stronger and to serve as a role model for university student entrepreneurship.
By the second half of 2014, the first batch of commercial pigs bred that year at the farm successfully came to market one after another. Although these small black pigs raised in the wild had not been on the market long and had never been advertised, some merchants from Hangzhou, Zhejiang and Shanghai still tracked them down through online searches or introductions from friends to place orders. During the 2015 Spring Festival, the farm's small black pigs were ordered 200-plus head in one go. These small black pigs weighed only a little over 100 jin as live pigs, and customers who ordered them all bought whole pigs after dehairing and bleeding, at an average of about 40 yuan per jin, greatly welcomed by customers, and they scored an instant success.
A novel promotion, launching the "Internet + black pig" brand
After the initial entrepreneurial success, Wang Xiaohui faced a series of problems, including high sales costs from supermarket entry fees and great difficulty in rapidly raising brand awareness in the short term.
To this end, Wang Xiaohui used his knowledge of online marketing and computer expertise to conduct in-depth research on Internet application services such as B2B e-commerce and O2O online marketing models. At the same time, combining the experience and connections he had accumulated while doing network management at the Internet company, and combining the characteristics of the products, he carefully set up an online store.
The online store used "the most authentic taste of the mountains" as its signature, and all the "items" listed came from the ecological ingredients of the mountain city of southern Anhui, promising "to achieve full ecological production throughout, with all sources visible." Its products such as deep-mountain free-range wild boar meat, hillside free-range native chickens, and native eggs quickly won over the online market, and the share of online sales of the cooperative's products has exceeded 50%.
In May 2015, Wang Xiaohui registered and established Jixi County Taoshi No. 1 E-Commerce Co., Ltd., and connected with the Shanghai "66 Neighborhood Direct Supply" platform of Sifang E-Commerce to further open up the online sales market. Now, Wang Xiaohui markets six to seven hundred head of "Jixi black pigs" annually, and added to that, Wang Xiaohui raises ducks in the river near the farm and raises native chickens on the hillside of "Qiankengwu," with total annual output value already reaching more than 5 million yuan.
More gratifying still, while succeeding in entrepreneurship, Wang Xiaohui also smoothly completed his courses at Anhui Agricultural University and obtained a bachelor's degree, achieving a double harvest in career and studies. Speaking of his next plans, his goal is very clear: by the end of 2017, he plans to build a large-scale ecological breeding base with an annual output of 5,000 free-range black pigs, attract more than 100 farming households, realize the advantages of centralized operation, and build a new "Internet + black pig" brand.