The entrepreneurial story of two porcupine-farming brothers
Xie Shanyang and his wife Wang Dongmei, of the Sanletang village group in Hongse village, Yangjiang town, Qionghai city, Hainan province, have worked as hired hands, run street stalls, sold roast meats and opened a stationery shop. Later they became the first in Hainan to succeed in farming porcupines on a large scale, and they supply porcupine breeding stock and porcupine-farming know-how to villagers and to farmers in many parts of the province, leading more and more people to prosperity.
Xie Shanyang, born in the 1980s, finished technical school in Haikou in 2006 and went to work in a factory in Jinpan, Haikou, earning 600 yuan a month with board and lodging included. A master worker at the factory told Xie Shanyang that to get rich he would still have to start his own business. Xie Shanyang set up a street stall. "During that time I pushed a little cart and sold all sorts of things, newspapers, car accessories and so on, but it was only ever enough to scrape by." Then one chance occasion, watching a health programme on TV, he learned that porcupine quills have a wide range of uses. Xie Shanyang did some research and found that very few people on the market were selling porcupine quills, so the product he sold became porcupine quills.
"I set up my stall at Dongmen market in Haikou and other places, and business was quite good." Xie Shanyang was selling porcupine quills, but he began hatching a "plan" about porcupines themselves: if he farmed porcupines, wouldn't he then be able to sell both the quills and the meat, and surely earn more?
No sooner said than done! Xie Shanyang went back to his hometown, built pigsties, and then went off to Anhui to bring back 12 porcupine breeding stock, at 3,500 yuan each.
Yet once he was back home, problems came one after another. Five of them fell ill and died soon after arriving, and three months later only 4 female porcupines were left, unable to be mated; when he tried to sell them to restaurants, they fetched no price because their quality was poor.
"Tens of thousands of yuan went down the drain just like that." Xie Shanyang told a Hainan Daily reporter that his family had opposed the idea from the start. Although there had been porcupines in the mountains of Qionghai in earlier years, which showed the climate and environment suited porcupine growth, no one had ever heard of anyone around there farming them on a large scale.
Starting many ventures, yet always thinking of porcupines
After this first big investment in farming met with disaster, Xie Shanyang felt low and lost his appetite for food and drink. His girlfriend Wang Dongmei, who worked as an accountant at a company in Haikou, took special leave to come to Xie Shanyang's home to care for and comfort him.
First marry, then build a career! His father gave the idea a helpful nudge. "With a family, I hope he won't act on impulse in everything anymore; with a sense of responsibility to his family, it will make him steadier in what he does." His parents' good intentions and his girlfriend's care put Xie Shanyang back in high spirits, and he held a lively wedding in his hometown.
In 2011, Xie Shanyang and his wife took 100,000 yuan that his father had scraped together from here and there and went to Guilin Yang University Town in Haikou to open a stationery shop, but business was sluggish. The two of them then went to Guangzhou to work at a hotel run by his wife's relatives, and for a time they even ran a small street stall in Guangzhou selling roast meats.
"But no matter what I did, porcupines were always on my mind." Xie Shanyang told the reporter that during more than a year in Guangzhou he studied porcupine farming even more deeply, and whenever he had spare time from doing business he would run off to Anhui to learn farming techniques.
Seeing her husband's devotion to porcupines, Wang Dongmei made a bold decision at the end of 2012: she borrowed 200,000 yuan from her parents' family to support her husband in farming porcupines again.
Farming success fulfils the dream of prosperity
Carrying the 200,000 yuan, the couple returned once more to that stretch of red earth. "I noticed that this time he was different from last time; he was very particular about building the pigsties, paying attention to ventilation and also to insulation, and he went about things in a very methodical way." His father went from paying no attention at all to actively supporting him.
This time he again brought 15 porcupine breeding stock back from Anhui to the pigsties, but the porcupines did not fall ill, because they had been fed salt water at the place of origin, and after returning they were again given salt water and their food intake was controlled, so the porcupines gradually adapted to the local water and soil. During the porcupines' growth, he resolutely did not feed them hormone-containing feed, using local corn and other things as the main feed instead; for disease prevention he mainly used Chinese medicine and did not use antibiotics... This time, Xie Shanyang succeeded! By the end of 2013, 10 female porcupines had given birth to 15 young porcupines.
Using the techniques and experience he had mastered, Xie Shanyang began boldly bringing in porcupine breeding stock to raise. Today his porcupine pens hold 47 male porcupines, 94 female porcupines, more than 50 young porcupines and more than 100 porcupines for market. One market porcupine weighs 20 to 25 jin, and the market price is about 95 yuan per jin.
Xie Shanyang also set up the Sanle Porcupine Cooperative, leading neighbouring villagers to farm porcupines, buying their breeding stock, taking responsibility for passing on farming techniques, and guaranteeing to buy back the market porcupines. Farmers from Sanya, Danzhou, Baisha and other places came in droves, drawn by his reputation, to buy porcupine breeding stock and learn porcupine-farming techniques. With the support of units including the Qionghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League and the Science and Technology Bureau, Xie Shanyang is building two additional two-storey porcupine farms to expand the scale of his breeding and market porcupines.
"Demand on the island is great, but I don't want to do an exclusive business. I hope to lift more people to prosperity and to supply good-quality, low-priced market porcupines beyond the island as well." Xie Shanyang said.