Large White Goose Farming Helps Farmers in Qinggang County, Heilongjiang Realize Their Dream of Prosperity

In recent years, Yongfeng Town in Qinggang County has taken advantage of the favorable opportunity of Qinggang's vigorous development of the white goose industry to vigorously develop white goose farming. Now many rural women have grown intogoose farmingexperts and goose brokers, and 35-year-old Zhang Xiumin is one of them.

Zhang Xiumin is the director of the village women's congress in Pingquan Village, Yongfeng Town. Before raising white geese, her family's main source of income was farming and raising fattening pigs. Although life was happy enough, seeing more and more people around her grow rich through developing animal husbandry made her anxious. Although raising pigs had brought her a relatively high income over the years, it was greatly affected by the market, with highly volatile returns, a long cycle, large investment, high costs and high risks. At this time, the successful example of Tan Yongshuang in the same village raising white geese inspired her. Moreover, compared with other projects, white goose farming requires less investment, carries less risk, yields quick results and has broad market prospects, and it also suited her conditions at the time. With the idea of giving it a try, she went to Tan Yongshuang to learn about farming techniques. Under Tan Yongshuang's patient explanation, she became even more determined to raise white geese, so in 2010 she bought 500 goslings, converted her originally idle yard into a simple goose shed, and began hergoose farmingjourney.

Because she had no farming experience, Zhang Xiumin did not dare to be negligent from the start. While raising the goslings, she got up early and worked late grazing them, giving them water, adding feed and administering vaccines, and she also used the evening to study books on white goose farming, ask Tan Yongshuang about problems she did not understand, and look up relevant information online to learn about the white goose market. After more than 3 months of careful raising, that year she sold 450 finished geese and earned more than 8,000 yuan. Faced with this success, Zhang Xiumin's confidence doubled, and she was determined to expand the scale of farming. Expanding the scale required a large sum of money, so when the town women's federation learned of the situation, it helped her coordinate a small loan of 30,000 yuan, and she built goose sheds.

In 2014, the town government increased its efforts to develop the white goose industry. To make it convenient for farmers to sell finished geese, it signed contracts with Hongxi Animal Husbandry Co., Ltd. to uniformly pre-order goslings, carry out unified epidemic prevention, provide free guidance and training, and buy back finished geese at a guaranteed floor price of 8 yuan per jin. If the market price was higher than the floor price, the company would buy back finished geese at the market price. With such convenient and favorable conditions, Zhang Xiumin became even more determined to continue expanding the scale of goose farming. In 2015, she increased from 1,000 white geese in previous years to more than 3,000, and the expanded scale also put greater pressure on Zhang Xiumin. Raising goslings in particular was meticulous work: feeding, watering, administering vaccines, and above all fearing crushing, so checks had to be made on time day and night. For nearly half a month, she and her husband took turns keeping watch, afraid that something might go wrong. Once the goslings were finally taken out to pasture, the couple could breathe a sigh of relief. The daily work was still very hard, requiring them to get up early and work late grazing and feeding, but watching the white geese grow day by day, they felt energetic again. In recent years of raising geese, Zhang Xiumin also achieved good economic returns and got a taste of the benefits. Zhang Xiumin decided to hatch goslings herself. This year she kept 2,000 breeding geese, and plans to hatch 30,000 goslings next year to solve the problem of purchasing goslings from outside.

This year Zhang Xiumin can earn 70,000 yuan from raising geese. Seeing how good the returns from goose farming were, Zhang Xiumin did not forget her sisters in the same village. She went to several close sisters in the village and encouraged them to raise geese. Under her leadership, there were 5 households in the village raising more than 2,000 white geese and more than 10 households raising more than 500. Whenever the sisters who had just started raising geese encountered problems they did not understand, as long as they came to her, she would personally go to the site and do her utmost to help solve them. Watching her family's white geese grow day by day, Zhang Xiumin said with emotion: "It is the Party's policy of enriching the people and the government's support that helped me get on the road to prosperity. In the future, I will continue to work hard to develop white goose farming, and I plan to establish a white goose production and sales integrated cooperative in the village, so that more villagers can join the cooperative, operate together, let the villagers live a good life, and contribute my part to increasing the villagers' income and helping them become prosperous."