Specialty breeding cycle park settles on barren beach, carving out a road to prosperity

Recently, the author came to Group 5 of Minsheng Village, Qiujiang Subdistrict, Guichi District, Chizhou City, Anhui Province, to the "Hongtian Ecological Agriculture Park," and immediately felt the charm of ecological circular agriculture.

Finding the "park owner" and chatting about his entrepreneurial journey, Qian Gang was full of emotion. This "post-80s" young man from Zongyang, busy inside and out all day, had his face tanned dark. After being discharged from the military in 2002, through seeking advice from experts at Xi'an Agricultural University, Qian Gang made another decision: to develop specialty breeding, feeding poultry with vegetables and growing vegetables with poultry manure, to build an ecological cycle park of crop farming and livestock breeding. So, at the end of 2010, Qian Gang purchased 80 breeding peafowl, 30 breeding ostriches, 400 guinea fowl, and 3,000 pheasants from Fujian, Jiangxi and other places, and also bought 6,000 native chickens from Qingyang. But things often do not go as smoothly as imagined. Not long after, Qian Gang, lacking experience in specialty breeding, suffered one failure after another: first, most of the ostriches and peafowl died, then the pheasants pecked and fought each other causing mass injuries, and more than 4,000 native chickens died from disease.


Though repeatedly hit, Qian Gang did not lose heart. "This is all the fault of blind entrepreneurship!" Learning from his mistakes, Qian Gang rushed to Xi'an Agricultural University with his difficult problems, sought diagnosis and advice from experts, and invited three interns from the university to work together to solve the breeding problems. After several rounds of exploration, Qian Gang mastered a complete set of breeding techniques from feed mixing and chick rearing to disease prevention. However, Qian Gang was not satisfied, and devoted himself to tackling the problem, making a self-made multi-functional incubator, and in the spring of this year successfully hatched young peafowl, young ostriches and young pheasants. Now, the stock of ostriches and pheasants has doubled, and the peafowl he raises have increased from the original 80 to more than 600, attracting merchants from Nanjing and other places to come and place orders. Qian Gang tasted the sweetness of entrepreneurship, and also opened a mountain delicacy restaurant in the city. Next, he plans to build another ecological farm in Dunshang or Lishan, and prepare to establish a specialty breeding cooperative, leading more farmers to prosperity.