Porcupine farming breaks into new markets, veteran refuses to give up

In October this year, a series of products including ready-to-eat braised porcupine meat, porcupine meat sauce, and spicy porcupine meat from Xiangxi hit the market. Liu Qianjun went deep into the front lines of the market to conduct research and listen to the opinions and suggestions of franchisees.

The maker says, "I gave up a 200,000-yuan annual salary to come home and start a business, all because of that pain in my heart. The poverty of my hometown left me with pain that runs too deep. I threw myself into it without hesitation with everything I had. Even if it bankrupts me, I will still come back to my hometown to start a business. I just want to soothe the pain in my heart, be an example of entrepreneurship, and drive my fellow villagers to innovate and start businesses, so we can end the generations of poverty in my hometown."

He is 39 this year and has been through 6 "soldier sorties" in his life.

-- This is how veteran and "Porcupine Farming King" Liu Qianjun sums himself up.

Although he has been out of the military for 15 years, he still carries "the smell of a soldier" from head to toe: a dark face, a short buzz cut, a resolute gaze, a straight-backed posture, and that faded camouflage uniform.

His comrades call him the stubborn, all-out Sangzhi "Xu Sanduo."

On November 5, Liu Qianjun told a reporter from Sanxiang Metropolis Daily's "Entrepreneurship Weekly" that everything he does now, including his character and soul, is rooted in the military.

He once earned two merits in the 38th Group Army, known as the "Ten Thousand Years Army." Now, he is leading a group of farmers and comrades in farming porcupines in his hometown of Sangzhi.

He registered a company and established a porcupine farming cooperative, planning to use modern marketing methods such as WeChat business and e-commerce to bring green porcupine meat from deep in the mountains to the world.

At the same time, he is also quietly calculating another "little plan": to lead his fellow villagers to prosperity and, together with several comrades, realize the dream of changing the backward face of his hometown.

First sortie:

Joining the military, vowing to carve out a world of his own

Sangzhi County in Zhangjiajie City is an impoverished county. Liu Qianjun's home, Dingjiayu Village, is located deep in the mountains, and it takes more than 1 hour of mountain road walking to reach the nearest market town.

When he was in school, Liu Qianjun was a top student known far and wide locally. In the three years of junior high school, he took six exams and placed first five times and second once. In 1994, he was admitted to high school with excellent results. However, in his second year of high school, because he could not afford the more than 100 yuan in tuition, Liu Qianjun was forced to drop out. At 17, he ran off to Zhangjiajie City alone to work, carrying bricks, hauling sand, and mixing cement slurry at construction sites. He did every dirty and exhausting job.

"When settling wages at the end of the year, the boss defaulted on our pay," Liu Qianjun said. At the time, he did not even have the travel fare to go home, so the contractor gave him an old bicycle in place of wages. "I rode that old bicycle home for the New Year. I set out from Zhangjiajie Railway Station at 10 a.m. and did not ride home until 10 p.m." Liu Qianjun recalled that he did not eat anything along the way, and when he was thirsty he drank mountain spring water by the roadside.

In December 1996, I joined the military. "When I put on the uniform and got on the truck to leave my hometown, I swore to myself that I must carve out a world of my own."

Second sortie:

Ice tore the calluses off his palms, and he became a training model soldier

The 38th Group Army is the world-renowned "Ten Thousand Years Army," and Liu Qianjun became a field communications soldier.

In his first 5-kilometer armed cross-country run, Liu Qianjun ran until he fainted. To prove himself, Liu Qianjun often got up in the middle of the night to run, and he pushed himself to the best result in the entire regiment.

"At that time, my horizontal bar results were also not ideal, and I held the class back in assessments, so I quietly got up at 4 a.m. to practice on the horizontal bar." Liu Qianjun recalled that in winter in Baoding, Hebei, the nighttime temperature was more than 10 degrees Celsius below zero. As soon as his hands touched the bar, they stuck to the frost on it. When he came down from the bar, the calluses were torn off by the ice, leaving several holes in his hands and blood streaming down. Because of his hard training and outstanding results, Liu Qianjun was rated as a training model soldier.

During his 5 years in the military, Liu Qianjun performed exceptionally. He won first place in the wired specialty competition of the entire division, successively served as squad leader and acting platoon leader, and earned third-class merits twice.

Third sortie:

After leaving the military, he gave up a 200,000-yuan annual salary to farm porcupines

At the end of 2001, Liu Qianjun reluctantly left the fiery military camp and returned home as a veteran.

He applied to work as a security guard at Zhangjiajie Bailong Elevator. Because he was diligent and willing to work, he was quickly promoted to security team leader, HR supervisor, and comprehensive service department manager, with a monthly salary of more than 5,000 yuan.

But just then, unwilling to settle for the status quo, Liu Qianjun resigned and went to Shenzhen, where he worked as a food and beverage department supervisor at a large hotel. After several years of hard work, Liu Qianjun's annual salary had reached 200,000 yuan.

While working in Shenzhen, Liu Qianjun found that many hotel guests liked to eat porcupine meat. Sales were good and the price was high. "In my hometown Sangzhi, relatives often catch porcupines when hunting." Liu Qianjun thought Sangzhi had an original ecological natural environment and should be very suitable for raising porcupines.

Having discovered a business opportunity, Liu Qianjun again felt restless inside. With the dream of entrepreneurship, in 2011 Liu Qianjun returned to Sangzhi carrying 1 million yuan in cash that he had saved from years of working.

"Let's farm porcupines together!" Liu Qianjun's idea struck a chord with several comrades.

"Around November 2011, 4 comrades borrowed an old pickup truck and set off, successively visiting Jiangxi, Hubei, Sichuan, and other places to inspect porcupine farming projects." Liu Qianjun recalled that the truck broke down on a remote mountain road in Enshi, Hubei, and several comrades pushed the vehicle for several li late at night. To save money, the 4 comrades all squeezed into one room to sleep.

The inspection found that the market for porcupines was very good, with demand still exceeding supply at 140 yuan per jin, and the farming technology was also easy to learn.

"Let's do it as soon as we get home!" The several men, full of confidence, were determined to start a business.

Fourth sortie:

A porcupine farm built in a barren mountain village

After returning from the inspection, several comrades pooled more than 100,000 yuan and did the work themselves, carrying sand, moving bricks, and building walls... In the twelfth lunar month of 2011, a farm with more than 100 pig pens was completed.

After that, they spent another 240,000 yuan to introduce 80 breeding pigs from Jiangxi, Changde, and other places. "The total investment for the first phase was 500,000 yuan, and I held 51% of the shares," Liu Qianjun said.

However, we underestimated the wildness of porcupines. The railings of the pens built to standard were too low, and several strong porcupines actually climbed over the walls at night and ran into the mountains. "They were worth several tens of thousands, and several comrades searched the mountains all night with torches and flashlights," Liu Qianjun said. In the end, they cornered and caught the escaped porcupines beneath a rock wall.

As the breeding speed accelerated, during the spring and summer of the second year we invested more than 200,000 yuan to expand with more than 200 additional pig pens, and introduced another 40 breeding pigs from elsewhere. In 2012, the farming scale reached nearly 300.

"We knew porcupine meat was delicious, but after farming porcupines for several years, we ourselves had never eaten it because it was too expensive," Liu Qianjun said. Porcupines are aggressive and often fight until their skin is torn and flesh is exposed. Several comrades joked at the time that if a porcupine died, we would give it a taste. But porcupines almost never get sick, and their self-repair ability after injury is very strong. Their wounds never become inflamed or infected, and they heal in a few days without any treatment.