Developing blue fox farming to get on the road to increased income and prosperity
Nowadays, specialty farming has become a way for many villagers to make their fortunes, and Su Qinxia is one of them. Walking into Su Qinxia's blue fox breeding base, row upon row of neat cages hold white, black and tan blue foxes dozing and resting with their eyes narrowed in the warm sunshine.
Su Qinxia, 49 this year, is from Xinxian Branch Farm of Liaohe Farm in Liaohe Agricultural Reclamation Management District, and is a specialized blue fox breeder. She raises nearly 8,000 breeding foxes, markets about 5,000 blue foxes a year, with an annual output value of 6 million yuan and income of nearly 4 million yuan.
In the winter of 1995, Su Qinxia bought a high-end coat at a shopping mall in the city; the price at the time was 2,700 yuan, and the salesperson explained that the fur collar was blue fox fur, worth more than 1,000 yuan. The speaker meant nothing by it, but the listener took it to heart. Su Qinxia thought that if blue fox fur was so valuable, raising blue foxes was sure to make money. So the next year she got in touch with an agricultural program on CCTV Channel 2, learned that breeding foxes were for sale in Hebei Province, and went to the fur market in Hebei to investigate. In June 1997, after discussing it with her husband, she decided to set up a blue fox breeding farm, buying 15 groups at once for a total investment of 150,000 yuan.
In the second year of breeding, the blue foxes produced 225 cubs, of which 195 survived. However, it happened to coincide with the worldwide economic crisis at the time, and fox fur prices fell again and again. On top of that, the breeding foxes they had bought were by then an obsolete breed in China, so fox fur prices dropped to rock bottom, and at the time they lost more than 100,000 yuan. Faced with this situation, Su Qinxia analyzed the circumstances at the time; only two paths lay before them: one was to shut down immediately and accept the loss rather than keep going; the other was to keep working hard to the end. After careful analysis and study, the couple resolved to see it through. In 1999, Su Qinxia took out a high-interest loan of 40,000 yuan and bought fine American blue foxes, Finnish second-generation foxes, snow foxes and other breeds. As the economic crisis eased, the price of each fox pelt gradually recovered, which also brought new dawn to Su Qinxia's breeding business, and that year she earned back the money she had put in.
After earning back her capital, Su Qinxia further expanded the scale of her breeding operation. In 2008 she kept another 100 female foxes, and gross income reached nearly 400,000 yuan. In addition, she began to practice scientific breeding and carried out artificial insemination. This made breeding, raising and selling a single integrated chain, and she also built a 20-ton cold storage facility for breeders to use. In 2009, Su Qinxia bought 2 more dairy cows and fed the blue foxes with milk, which could increase their nutrition, and then used the cow and fox manure to fertilize her own 1.2-hectare contracted field, which saved on chemical fertilizer costs and raised the economic returns from farming.
In 2010, Su Qinxia moved the blue fox breeding farm near an old brick factory and built a new blue fox breeding farm of more than 10,000 sq m. She also adopted a credit-sale approach to spur the development of the blue fox breeding industry among villagers in Xinxian Branch Farm and the surrounding area, and often provided technical services door to door, so that the villagers gradually got on the road to prosperity through blue fox farming.