Migrant worker becomes a "goose commander," gets rich raising geese
"Goose, goose, goose, curving its neck to sing to the sky." In the livestock and poultry market, white geese are treasures from head to toe: goose feathers fetch high prices and sell well in the down market, and the prices of goose necks, feet and goose meat are all high as well. Dou Xianjun, a villager from Hexing Village, Yaoli Town, Huoqiu County, returned home to start a business. This spring he raised more than 1,000 fine-breed white geese, and through raising white geese he embarked on the road to prosperity, making his neighbours sit up and take notice and call him the "goose commander."
Dou Xianjun, approaching 40, left his hometown years ago to work as a migrant worker in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang area, but after deducting rent, water and electricity bills and living expenses, little was left at the end of each month. He heard from acquaintances that many people back home had made a lot of money through breeding and farming, and some had even become small bosses worth millions. Dou Xianjun thought that no matter how wonderful the outside world was, it was not as settled as being back home, so in 2013 he resolved to return to his hometown to start a business.
After returning home, Dou Xianjun visited farms near and far many times to learn from their experience. After a year of practice and exploration, Dou Xianjun had gained a preliminary grasp of a set ofgoose-raisingexperience. In the spring of 2015, Dou Xianjun bought more than 800 goslings of fine breeds from a large farm in Shuyang, Jiangsu, and also bought more than 300 local white geese from Fuyang. After buying the goslings, Dou Xianjun built a goose shed on the embankment of his own pond. During this period, he also attended new-type farmer breeding training classes held by the town and village many times, learning a great deal of popular science knowledge about breeding. Through careful and scientific raising, the goslings grew well all along.
More than a thousand white geese were released to roam freely across the boundless fields of rice stubble, like pure white flowers inlaid in the fields, becoming a beautiful sight in the local countryside. It happened to be the autumn harvest season, and the rice grains scattered in the fields could provide food for the geese to forage, saving two months of artificially fed feed, which both reduced cost input and increased the geese's amount of exercise. Today, each white goose raised by Dou Xianjun weighs 5 to 6 kg.
As the weather gradually cools, the more than a thousand white geese raised by Dou Xianjun have instead begun to sell well, mainly through the local market as the primary sales channel. People from the surrounding area competed to buy fresh goose meat to cure "cured goose," and some were even sold as far away as Bengbu and other places. Net income is expected to reach more than 70,000 yuan.