A skilled woman sheep farmer uses integrity to unite her fellow villagers in achieving shared prosperity
Li Hongyan, now 39 years old, a member of the Communist Party of China, is an ordinary peasant woman on the famous mid-high mountain Baini Huang Mountain in Fenxiang Township, Yichang City, chairwoman of the Yichang Chengxiang Sheep Breeding Professional Cooperative, a National Model Worker, and a Model of Jingchu.
True to her word, she provides breeding sheep to cooperative members free of charge and implements a "five unifications" management model: unified technical guidance, unified improved-breed breeding, unified epidemic prevention and control, unified product processing, and unified buyback and sales. She has led more than 700 farming households to prosperity, forging a bridge of integrity between herself and the cooperative's farmers and consumers, and has become known as the famous "female general of the sheep gate." Chengxiang Cooperative has successively won many honors including "National Demonstration Cooperative of Farmers' Cooperatives." Multiple products have obtained national registered trademarks.
Honest entrepreneurship forges excellent enterprise quality
On December 8, 2007, she and her husband Tian Zhenqin scraped together 26,000 yuan and bought 95 white goats to raise in their hometown of Fenxiang. She and her husband agreed that they wanted to raise high-quality white goats that people could eat with confidence and satisfaction, and from then on began her arduous journey of raising sheep and her perseverance. In early 2008, a rare ice and snow storm struck. The plastic film around the sheep shed used for wind and rain protection was blown away, and the flock's feed was cut off. After the storm, 40 of the 95 sheep had still died. Li Hongyan was heartbroken and set her mind to finding new ideas for raising sheep.
She sold her house on Xiaoxita Street in the urban area for 260,000 yuan, brought in a shareholder from Guangdong, and raised a total of 2.1 million yuan to renovate buildings, purchase processing equipment, and set up Yichang's first sheep-raising and mutton-processing factory. To study the processing procedures and techniques, Li Hongyan bought one of each product from a well-known ecological agriculture company and studied their ingredients and processing methods. Unexpectedly, the first batch of 70 sheep that were slaughtered and cured was sent into the smoking room for smoking. After two days and two nights, when the smoked mutton came out, it had a foul odor. She refused to let low-quality mutton enter the market and threw more than 100,000 yuan worth of mutton that could still have been processed and sold into the biogas pit. Li Hongyan and her husband carried out experiments again, smoking a little less each time and keeping detailed records of every smoking process. After a period of experimentation and improvement, they mastered the temperature, humidity, and smoking density of the smoking room, successfully developed a set of mutton production techniques, and brought vacuum-packed mutton to market, achieving the transformation of mutton from a "winter food" to an "all-season food." The mutton products developed through painstaking experimentation still had no buyers. Li Hongyan and her husband took the newly produced mutton ham to specialty stores and supermarkets in Yichang, Wuhan, Jingzhou, and other places. At each stop, they first gave two boxes to the people there to taste, saying that if they thought there was a market, they could contact her for delivery. In this process, they gave away 270 portions, averaging 260 yuan each, totaling more than 70,000 yuan given away. Even so, the work of giving things away was not easy. Once, when delivering goods to a store in Yichang's urban area, the owner not only did not glance at the product, but also mocked Li Hongyan for not knowing her place in pricing the product at more than 200 yuan. Although Li Hongyan felt bad, she still gave the mutton to the owner so he could sell it if he could. Unexpectedly, a week later, the owner actually called her to ask for a delivery. Through a strategy of winning over customers one by one, her mutton products were ultimately accepted by the market.
Treating people with sincerity and leading a win-win circle of prosperity
One person getting rich is not true wealth; only when everyone prospers together is it real wealth. In 2011, Li Hongyan established Chengxiang Cooperative. She went deep into poor mountainous townships, visited farmers in difficulty, invited them to join the sheep-raising cooperative, and promised to provide breeding sheep and breeding technology training free of charge to poor farming households. At first, many villagers doubted Li Hongyan's promise, believing it was another empty check that could not be realized. How could pies fall from the sky? Li Hongyan told them in a firm voice, "You just focus on raising them. I, Li Hongyan, will provide breeding sheep free of charge. As long as the quality passes, I will buy as many as you raise. I will pay at a price 20% higher than the market!"
It is easy for a person to say something, but it is not easy to keep turning those words into reality consistently for years. Li Hongyan did it. Li Hongyan kept her promise, successively investing more than 3 million yuan to build 36 standardized sheep sheds with a total area of more than 6,000 sq m for poor farming households to raise sheep, and provided more than 260 breeding sheep free of charge to poor households. Sheep-raising farmers achieved an average net income of 28,600 yuan per household. Up to now, a total of 729 farmer breeding members have been developed, all implementing unified purchasing of production materials such as breeding sheep, grass seed, and veterinary drugs, saving farmers 18.8% in breeding costs. The unified selling price of slaughtered mutton sheep is 20% higher than the market, sold through four forms: market wholesale, retail, leading enterprise orders, and supermarkets, achieving a joint sales rate of more than 95%. People affectionately call her the cooperative's "female general of the sheep gate."
Promoting sales through integrity and building a widely recognized good brand
After leading a group of people to wealth, Li Hongyan began pondering how to further improve the quality of white goats, strengthen quality integrity, stabilize and expand the market through quality, and create a white goat brand belonging to Yichang. She carried out technical cooperation with the Key Laboratory of Biological Breeding of the Ministry of Education at Huazhong Agricultural University and established an "Academician Workstation" for the improved-breed breeding of Yichang white goats, with an annual supply of improved breeds reaching 1,200 head, and was rated as a standardized mutton sheep breeding demonstration farm by the Ministry of Agriculture. She guided cooperative members to explore and innovate in mutton food cooking techniques, forming a uniquely characteristic flavored mutton dining cuisine series. Under the brand "Ming Yang Tian Xia," she opened "Lao Gao Huang" branded mutton dining brand stores, further promoting the preservation and appreciation of mutton products. "Yichang White Goat" successfully applied for "National Agricultural Product Geographical Indication" registration and protection. She built a good brand recognized by consumers.
Raising sheep with integrity, operating with integrity, and creating a brand with integrity, Li Hongyan used her thin shoulders to support a bridge of trust with cooperative farmers, and even more so a bridge of trust with consumers.