A farmer in Ding'an, Hainan earns 3 million yuan a year from raising chickens, and small buildings are multiplying in the village

Walking along the clean and tidy concrete village road into the village, plump capons and hens were foraging under the areca palms, and on both sides of the road stood buildings under construction, some already renovated and some still being built. Yesterday, the reporter came to Shipo Village, Longmen Town, Ding'an County.

Shipo Village today looks like a big construction site. In a house under construction at the entrance to the village, the owner, Mo Yu'an, was watching the construction workers at work, and 3 workers were hurrying to lay tiles. Mo Yu'an gave instructions to the workers while helping hand them tiles. Before long, the tiles in the room were all laid, but Mo Yu'an still was not reassured and checked them with a spirit level before he was satisfied.

Since construction of the new house began, Mo Yu'an has been busy every day. Besides coordinating the purchase of all kinds of materials, he also has to feed the chickens. Though it is hard work, looking at the nearly finished new house fills him with joy, and he hopes it can be completed as soon as possible so he can move into the brand-new small building early.

“The new house is not small. How much will it cost to build?” the reporter asked.

“It covers more than 160 sq m, and building it, including decoration, will cost about 250,000 yuan,” Mo Yu'an said.

This farmer before us has never left the countryside and has never gone into business, so where did he get so much money to build a small building?

“By raising chickens, of course!” Mo Yu'an is one of the earliest specialized chicken farmers in Shipo Village. He made use of the village's areca palm groves and rubber plantations and other resources to raise chickens under the trees, growing from just a few hundred in the past to nearly 10,000 sold a year now, earning more than 50,000 yuan a year from chicken farming. After several years of raising chickens, he accumulated around 200,000 yuan, and only then did he dare to build a small building.

“Raising chickens made money, and seeing others building houses, we decided to build one too and improve our lives,” Mo Yu'an said.

It is understood that Shipo Village is a well-known specialized chicken-farming village in the Ding'an area. The village has been raising chickens for 5 years now. Because all the chickens the villagers raise are free-range, growing up under the rubber and areca palms eating insects, they not only have good meat quality and excellent taste, but also sell very well. In recent years, more than 100 households in the Shipo area have taken up chicken farming, and the whole village sells 300,000 chickens a year. From this one item alone, the villagers of Shipo Village can make a profit of about 3 million yuan a year.

In Shipo Village, there are many other villagers who have found the road to prosperity by raising chickens. This year alone, 19 households, including Mo Anyou, Zheng Xueyong and Mo Yubin, have built new buildings. Some have finished decorating, and some are hurrying to decorate, striving to move in before the Spring Festival.

“In the past two years, our village has built at least 30 buildings, and small buildings are multiplying in the village,” Mo Yu'an said happily.

Mo Yujun, a village official of Shipo Village, said that after years of development, Shipo Village's chicken-farming brand has become more and more renowned. The report of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China stressed that by 2020 the per capita income of urban and rural residents should double that of 2010, that efforts should be made to boost farmers' incomes and maintain sustained and relatively rapid growth in farmers' incomes, and that he believes more and more agriculture-related funds will be invested in rural areas in the future. With the support and backing of government departments, Shipo Village's chicken-farming industry will grow bigger and bigger, and the farmers' incomes will grow higher and higher.

“Quite apart from anything else, with the whole village currently making more than 3 million yuan in profit a year from chicken farming, by 2020 it will be no problem for more than 70% of the villagers to have built new buildings,” Mo Yujun said confidently. (This newspaper, Dingcheng, December 21)