Experience sharing on achieving ecological prosperity by raising chickens and growing lotus roots

More than 30 mu of woodland was full of free-range mountain chickens, and the 12 mu of paddy fields outside the woodland were all planted with lotus roots, and these lotus roots did not cost a single cent on fertilizer... The author recently came to Group 9 of Longgu Village, Dagu Town, Naxi District, Luzhou City, and witnessed the ecological agriculture path to prosperity of young farmer Zhou Tiancai, who raises chickens and grows lotus roots.

"Look, the stems of these lotus roots are much larger than those grown by others. You can imagine how big the lotus roots growing in the mud are." While speaking, Zhou Tiancai went into the field and pulled up a section of lotus root weighing more than 5 jin. "My lotus roots can grow so plump and strong, and this is all thanks to chicken manure."

In 2010, Zhou Tiancai began engaging in ecological chicken farming. As the farming scale continued to expand, chicken manure disposal became a headache for Zhou Tiancai. In 2011, he learned a piece of information: chicken manure could be converted into biogas after fermentation in a biogas digester, and the biogas slurry and biogas residue left from biogas fermentation could provide high-quality organic fertilizer for crops. He immediately began putting it into practice, building biogas digesters of more than 500 cubic meters beside the chicken sheds of all his farms, and converting all the paddy fields located beside the woodland to lotus root cultivation, implementing a "chicken-biogas-manure-lotus root" circular planting system.

Zhou Tiancai said that compared with using chemical fertilizers, using chicken manure fermented and decomposed in biogas digesters as base fertilizer for lotus roots made the lotus roots grow noticeably more steadily, with thick and large root bodies, and they also had high yield and sweet taste, and were whiter, crispier, and more marketable than ordinary lotus roots. In recent years, his lotus roots had never been unsalable. What especially delighted Zhou Tiancai was that irrigating with biogas slurry could save 400 yuan in fertilizer costs and 100 yuan in labor costs per mu. Over a year, his 12 mu of lotus roots saved nearly 6,000 yuan in costs on fertilizer and labor alone.

In 2015, Zhou Tiancai's lotus root yield reached 2,000 kg per mu. Calculated at a market price of 7 yuan per kg, after deducting production costs, he could achieve a net income of 150,000 yuan. He had truly tasted the sweetness of ecological circular agriculture.