Porcupine farming helps villagers get rich

Seeing strangers approach, the porcupines raised their black-and-white quills one by one and made a "puff puff" sound from their mouths. "Don't be fooled by how gentle and cute they are now; when they get angry, even we don't dare go near them," Yang Jiafu said while feeding the porcupines corn kernels.

Yang Jiafu and his wife are young people from Fuhua Village, Xinmin Town, Da'an District, Zigong City. The young couple once worked as migrant laborers, and now they run a small plastic processing factory in their hometown. But the shrewd Yang Jiafu was not satisfied with the status quo. In March last year, by chance, the couple saw on TV the news that raising porcupines could also make them rich, which aroused great interest. "Others can earn 2 million yuan a year, so why can we only earn a few tens of thousands of yuan?" A bold idea flashed in Yang Jiafu's mind - raise porcupines. In April, the couple rented a van and made a special trip to the porcupine breeding base in Qianjiang District, Chongqing, to inspect and learn. Seeing groups of porcupines with arrow-like black-and-white quills darting back and forth, and buyers from all over the country driving up in high-end cars to place orders, Yang Jiafu became even more determined to raise porcupines. He immediately spent 36,000 yuan to buy 12 porcupines.

In Yang Jiafu's neatly arranged pigsties, each pen holds 2 to 4 porcupines. "Through careful breeding, the 12 breeding porcupines I bought back from Chongqing have now grown to 42. I receive several order and inquiry calls every day. However, I do not plan to sell commercial porcupines now; instead, I plan to keep a large number of breeding porcupines. It is expected that in 3 years, the breeding porcupines at my farm can reach about 300, and more than 700 commercial porcupines can be sold each year. If I just find one hotel or restaurant in Guangzhou and supply one porcupine a day, 360 a year, my income would still be considerable!" Yang Jiafu said confidently as he calculated the accounts.

According to the person in charge of the Da'an District Animal Husbandry Bureau, the porcupine is a precious herbivorous terrestrial animal that combines meat, medicinal and ornamental value. Because its meat is delicate and delicious, porcupine meat has long been known as "animal ginseng." High-end consumers are very fond of porcupine meat, and it has become a rare and precious food in high-end guesthouses and hotels in economically developed provinces and cities such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, where it has long been in short supply at high prices. Its feeding cost is low. It eats plant roots and stems, and likes corn, tubers, peanuts, melons, fruits and vegetables. One porcupine only consumes 4 to 5 mao of grain per day. It also has strong disease resistance. During feeding, as long as the proportion of green feed is controlled well, deworming is done regularly and drinking water is clean, diseases almost never occur. Each porcupine can grow to 15 to 20 kg. Porcupine quills, stomach, liver and gallbladder are all valuable. Among them, the quills can be used as medicine and can also be processed into handicrafts, each selling for 0.8 to 1.2 yuan. After extraction, the stomach can be made into a good medicine for treating stomach ailments. On the market, the price of porcupine stomach is 100 yuan each. At present, the market price of commercial porcupines in Guangzhou is about 160 yuan per kg. By conservative estimate, one porcupine is worth about 2,500 yuan. Yang Jiafu also said that next, he plans to introduce another batch of breeding porcupines and adopt the method of foster care or contract raising in farmers' homes to encourage more farmers to participate in porcupine breeding, thereby forming a breeding scale and leading more farmers onto the road to prosperity together.