The most beautiful pig farmer is in the mountainous area of western Zhejiang
Huang Shunv and her Jinhua Two-End Black pigs.
Rural Zhejiang is widely praised for its superior natural environment, and amid these green mountains and clear waters there is no shortage of inspiring entrepreneurial stories either. For example, the entrepreneurial tale of "a beautiful female university graduate who earns a million yuan a year raising pigs" took place in Fenshui Town, Tonglu County, Zhejiang Province. The protagonist of the story is named Huang Shunv; from ecological farming to internet-based private customization, this woman born in 1986 has already upgraded her "Liushu Farm" twice. On the matter of putting down roots in the countryside to start a business, she says she is "a pig-farming peasant willing to endure hardship," and her title of most beautiful "pig keeper" also stems from the two words "hard work."
After graduating from university she wanted to go out and try her luck
After losing several hundred thousand yuan over two years, she came home
Right now, most of the finished pigs at Liushu Farm have already been sent to market. A few days ago coincided with the Spring Festival, when visits among relatives and friends are unavoidable, and Huang Shunv, who succeeded in business, naturally became the focus of everyone's attention. "9 breeding sheds, an ecological breeding farm of more than 500 mu, the annual income must be considerable, right?" "Don't judge her by the fact that she's a girl, she's even more capable than a boy!"...
To such praise, Huang Shunv, who has raised pigs for nearly 10 years, has long grown accustomed. But whenever university graduates harboring "business dreams" come to seek her advice, the petite, delicately featured Huang Shunv tells them in "harsh" terms: "I never treat entrepreneurs as bosses; they suffer more than wage earners. I suggest you first try to accumulate some experience by working for others."
The reason she says this is perhaps that she sees her own reflection in this group of hot-blooded young people. "Actually, when I had just graduated from university, I also thought about being my own boss and making big money." Of course, the business Huang Shunv refers to is by no means spending all day with pigs. Because as far back as she can remember, her parents were well-known pig farmers in the village, but the pigsty was dirty and smelly, and pig farming was extremely hard physical labor, so the two words "pig farming" never appeared in her career plans at all.
In 2005, at the age of 20, she graduated from university. "At the time, many girls of the same age made money selling clothing, and I thought I could too." That same year, over her parents' objections, her clothing store opened, "I lost about 100,000 yuan in a year, and then I closed it."
The following year, Huang Shunv's handicraft store opened in Yiwu, and it ended with a loss of more than 100,000 yuan in less than a year... Speaking of her predicament back then, Huang Shunv looked full of guilt. "You know, before I was 20, I had never washed a single bowl at home. How could I bear a blow like that? But thinking about it now, the ones who were hurt the most should have been my parents."
"Stories of entrepreneurial success are indeed very moving, but it was only from that time that I understood entrepreneurship is not as simple as I had imagined." After her business failures, Huang Shunv had no choice but to return to Fenshui Town and stay at her parents' farm to help out with clerical work.
Through one training session after another, her clever mind found a place to be put to use. "There were many reasons I didn't want to raise pigs at first; in fact, this line of work loses money even more badly." Huang Shunv told reporters that in the pig-farming industry there is a saying: "Profit one year, lose one year, break even for three years." Not to mention that the price of live pork fluctuates with the market; what brings pig farmers the greatest losses is swine epidemics. "Previously, the piglets here were all introduced from Jinhua, Quzhou, and various places in Jiangsu, and often various diseases were brought in during this process." Huang Shunv said that once an epidemic breaks out in a certain pigsty, then the pigs in the entire pig farm will die one after another, and the pig farmer will lose several hundred thousand yuan in one go.
It is no exaggeration to say that such risks kept the Huang family living in fear for no small number of days, so much so that Huang Shunv's parents once had the idea of giving up a pig-farming career they had pursued for decades. "Fortunately, at the time, whenever I had time I would go out to study, and finally I found a way in ecological farming." Huang Shunv recalled that after she returned home, the county Youth League Committee and the Agricultural Office would organize pig farmers from the town to go out for training at irregular intervals. "At the time, a professor from the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences told me that feed pigs sent to market in half a year would definitely be replaced by organically raised local pigs."
Through one round of study and training after another, the idea of "transformation and upgrading, ecological pig farming" began to sprout in Huang Shunv's heart. In order to convince her parents with her own actions and prove her determination, throughout the entire winter of 2006, Huang Shunv got up at 4 a.m. every day, spent nearly an hour walking more than ten li of mountain road to the long-distance bus station in town, and worked part-time as a ticket seller. Seeing how resolute their daughter was, Huang Shunv's parents, with a try-it-and-see attitude, rented a piece of mountain land for their daughter in Xinlong Village, Fenshui Town.
A promotional film shot by the Youth League Committee earned her the first pot of gold in life
In 2009, Huang Shunv's Liushu Farm was finally completed. The breeding farm, with a total area of more than 500 mu, both planted crops and orchards and raised pigs. "The professor from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences told me that the 'Jinhua Two-End Black' breed is good, with a long breeding cycle, delicious meat, a high reproduction rate, and high returns, making it very suitable for farming." Huang Shunv said that although the place of origin of the Jinhua Two-End Black is Jinhua, in fact the climate and environment of Fenshui are similar to those of Jinhua, so there is no problem with the Two-End Black breeding here. "More importantly, the pigs I raise no longer eat feed; they are veritable grass pigs." In addition, pig manure and urine were returned to the nearby fields and hills, forming an integrated production model of crop farming and livestock breeding.
Even so, having experienced several business failures, she remained very cautious about this venture, and that year introduced only a few dozen breeding pigs for self-breeding and self-raising.
"There were too many failures, for all sorts of reasons, but if you want to succeed you must be thoroughly proficient in this industry." For Huang Shunv, who had grasped the reasons for failure, from feeding and vaccinating to hygiene management, she checked everything herself. "Once, my mother's friend came to the farm to visit and was very shocked to see me cleaning the pigsty." Huang Shunv admitted frankly that if she had not gone through setbacks, she would not have been able to endure such hardship, nor would she have had the courage to shoulder this responsibility. In her memory, in the early days of the farm's establishment, she followed her mother to the pigsty every day to clean pig manure and vaccinate the pigs, and wrote materials at night; even now her cervical spine still bears the aftereffects.
At the time, news of the beautiful "pig keeper" spread rapidly through the small town. "It was also in that year that I got to know Shu Dan, the current secretary of the Tonglu County Youth League Committee; a documentary she shot for me earned me the first pot of gold in my life." Huang Shunv recalled that in 2009, after the documentary about Huang Shunv's pig-farming experience was posted online by Shu Dan, who was then working at the Tonglu County Youth League Committee, not long afterward a buyer from Ningbo came with 200,000 yuan in cash and bought all the Jinhua Two-End Black pigs in Huang Shunv's pigsty.
To be precise, this pot of gold was an affirmation of Huang Shunv's entrepreneurship and also the driving force for her to move forward. After that, Huang Shunv built the farm into an integrated operation and breeding base for high-quality Jinhua Two-End Black pigs combining planting and breeding, integrating breeding, production, and sales. In October 2012, upon review and approval by the Hangzhou Technical Quality Supervision Bureau, the Tonglu County Technical Quality Supervision Bureau, and the Tonglu County Agriculture Bureau, the farm became a "Jinhua Two-End Black" breeding pig standardized breeding demonstration base.
In 2013, at the first Zhejiang Rural Youth Entrepreneurship and Wealth-Building Project Competition, jointly carried out by the Provincial Youth League Committee, the Provincial Agricultural Office, the Provincial Department of Science and Technology, the Provincial Department of Agriculture, the Provincial Radio and Television Group, the Provincial Rural Credit Union, and the Provincial Entrepreneurship Foundation, among other units, Huang Shunv's "High-Quality Two-End Black Pig Breeding Base Construction and Ecological Breeding Technology Development Project" won the Silver Award.
Combining e-commerce concepts and formally entering the e-commerce market. "The pigs of 2016 have all been sold out." At the beginning of the new year, such news made Huang Shunv, who had just set foot in the internet, beam with joy. It turned out that as early as 2014, Huang Shunv had begun selling "Two-End Black" pork by combining e-commerce concepts, opening a new channel different from the previous reliance on middlemen. On June 15, 2015, Huang Shunv established Hangzhou Wofeng Agricultural Development Co., Ltd., registered Liushu Farm as a brand, and entered the internet market.