Goat farming helps Daojiang farmers get rich
In the photo, Long Xuefeng separates the young goats and prepares to release them for grazing.
"Baa... baa..." Recently, as soon as the reporter approached the goat farm near Longmu Tun, Changdong Village, Daojiang Township, the sound of bleating could be heard. "Come, touch them. My goats are so gentle and cute." Sure enough, when we looked at them up close, the goats came over, especially fond of being near people. When the reporter gently stroked them, they actually acted coquettishly like little children, extremely cute.
"I was born in the Year of the Goat, so I have always felt a natural closeness to goats. Later, when I saw that a friend was making good profits from raising goats, I decided to raise goats too, so I quit my job outside and came back to raise them." Long Xuefeng, the owner of the farm, told the reporter that he told his wife about his idea of starting a business, and she gave him strong support, so the couple quit their jobs outside. In 2004, they took out a bank loan of 20,000 yuan and began raising goats.
For Long Xuefeng, raising goats was a business he deeply loved, and he put in a great deal of effort to raise them well. He bought many books on goat farming, specifically studied and researched goat-raising techniques, and often consulted experienced goat-farming experts. Finally, hard work paid off. A few years later, Long Xuefeng had mastered a wealth of farming techniques. Now, after more than 10 years of raising goats, he has become a semi-expert, and many people come to seek his advice.
"Raising too few is not worthwhile." This remark from a friend woke Long Xuefeng up, and he secretly resolved to expand his farming scale. In 2006, after selling goats and earning his first pot of gold, Long Xuefeng used the money to buy more goats and expand his farming scale. Step by step, steadily and surely, through self-breeding and self-raising, Long Xuefeng's farm gradually expanded, from 26 goats at the beginning to more than 500 now. As a result, the original old site could no longer meet the needs of development. So, at the beginning of this year, Long Xuefeng took out the savings he had accumulated over the years, plus a bank loan, and invested a total of 430,000 yuan to build a new goat shed.
According to Long Xuefeng, it takes 2 years from birth to sale for a goat. Goat farming is all done by free-range grazing, so the feed cost is not high; the main cost is labor to watch over them. And there is no worry at all about finding a market for the goats. His family's goats are mainly sold to Guangdong, with some sold locally. The selling price is 1,500-2,500 yuan per goat.
"Next year I want to bring in goats called 'Nubian' from Yunnan to improve the quality of the goats and achieve better profits." Now that his farm has developed to a certain scale, Long Xuefeng wants to work on the breed of the goats and introduce improved-breed goats that can sell for more than 4,000-5,000 yuan each, so as to obtain greater profits.