Small investment in ground beetle farming can also make big money

   The ground beetle is an omnivorous insect; vegetable leaves, melon rinds, forage grass, bran, cornmeal and the like are all ideal feed for it. Feed sources are wide-ranging and feeding costs are low. Jindi Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. of Minquan County, Henan Province, which has long been devoted to ground beetle research and development, through several years of painstaking study, has worked out a new technique using wheat straw, corn stalks, rice straw and other crop stalks, abundantly discarded in rural areas, as raw material to raise ground beetles. This is a major breakthrough in China's ground beetle farming industry. This technique not only reduces ground beetle farming costs by more than 70 percent and multiplies feeding efficiency, but also turns large amounts of idle crop stalks in rural areas from waste into treasure, greatly increasing their value.

    To make money from ground beetle farming, quality breeding stock and technique are the most critical. In the past, the reason some ground beetle farmers did not make money was that, apart from the factor of hyped-up high-priced breeding stock that left farmers unable to recover their costs, the use of traditional backward feeding techniques plus severely mixed and degraded varieties naturally left farmers with no money to make. By adopting the straw feeding method and combining it with a three-dimensional rearing model, the farming efficiency and utilization rate of an ordinary farm room can be increased by more than 5 times. The three-dimensional rearing house can be built simply with whatever is available: an idle ordinary farm room, or a plastic greenhouse with asbestos tiles and cement panels laid over it, will do; plastic basins can also be used as containers, with bamboo poles and wooden sticks set up as racks of 5 to 6 tiers, with about 45 cm between tiers. This model suits small and medium-scale farmers. Using this three-dimensional ground beetle rearing method, an ordinary farm room can yield a net income of more than 20,000 yuan a year.