Raising pigs for 20 years with steady profits and no losses: how a farmer cracked the pig cycle
The "pig cycle" has long been a market curse. Yet an ordinary farmer, over 20 years, has always managed to escape its grip and consistently "hold the market's hand well." From Zhang Bin's story, what can the many pig farmers savor?
Interviewing Zhang Bin was entirely by chance. The reporter was recently having a meal with Shen Dezhi, deputy director of the Agriculture Committee of Yandu District, Yancheng City, and when the topic of pig prices came up, he suddenly sighed with emotion: I really admire a farmer. He has raised pigs for decades, and his understanding of pigs is truly beyond words. He raises pigs well, earns a lot of money, and his judgment of the market is simply masterful... The reporter was fascinated and immediately decided to head straight to Chenyang Village in Dazonghu Town, the most remote part of Yandu District, to meet this astonishingly skilled farmer pigherd, Zhang Bin.
At two in the afternoon, the sun was blazing overhead. Hearing the car horn, the gate of Chenyang North Pig Farm slowly opened, and a thin, small, middle-aged man in work clothes appeared before the reporter. Walking into the simple pig shed hut, the first sentence he spoke completely stunned the reporter: "I started raising pigs in 1991, from two pigs to more than 3,000 now, and no matter how the market goes, I've never lost money."
Raising pigs for 20 years, never having lost money? In these 20 years, how many "roller-coaster" surges and plunges has China's pig market gone through! Zhang Bin calmly told the story of his undefeated pig farming——
"I failed the college entrance exam in 1986 and returned to the village. My family conditions were poor, and I wanted to find something to do as soon as possible to earn some money." At first he had no capital, so Zhang Bin raised chickens for a few years. Until one day, an advertisement changed his choice and his fate.
That was a "rapid fattening" advertisement from Guangdong, which suddenly sparked his interest in raising pigs. In 1991, Zhang Bin borrowed a few dozen yuan from someone, brought back two piglets, and 3 months later sold the fattened pigs, making 200 yuan in one stroke.
This truly excited Zhang Bin. From this he made a simple calculation: "If I raise 100, wouldn't I become a ten-thousand-yuan household?" A ten-thousand-yuan household, in rural areas in the early 1990s, was extraordinary, and now it had become something he himself could touch, which made the young Zhang Bin immensely excited. He treated pig farming like his unfulfilled college dream, striving with all his heart and strength.
"Following feeling is not as good as following books." Zhang Bin's pig farming was different from that of ordinary farmers. He loved to use his brain and loved to learn, bought a large number of science and technology books related to pig farming, and quickly figured out various pig-raising "skills" such as self-mixing pig feed, diagnosing and treating pig diseases, and crossbreeding. And his keen ability to grasp market information helped him achieve repeated successes.
A year later, Zhang Bin's annual income successfully broke through 10,000 yuan. But he soon discovered that selling piglets was more profitable than selling fattened pigs, so he decisively decided to raise breeding sows. Gradually "snowballing," Zhang Bin raised more and more pigs and earned more and more money.
In 1994, Zhang Bin encountered the first round of "crazy pig market" in his pig-raising career. "At the peak, piglets sold for 6 yuan a jin, while barley feed at the time sold for only one jiao seven per jin, and a piglet once sold for three or four hundred yuan!" By 1996, Zhang Bin already had more than 100,000 yuan on hand, so he rented 11 mu of village land, built a new pig farm, and that year raised more than 60 pigs.
By January 1998, just as Zhang Bin was preparing to sell pigs, the market turned sharply and pig prices plummeted. "The market price of piglets was only 8 jiao per jin, while the cost of self-made feed alone was 9 jiao." At this time, because Zhang Bin's pigs had a relatively good reputation in the market, someone offered 1 yuan 4 per jin to buy them. Sell or not sell? Zhang Bin hesitated for a moment and decided: not to sell! "I analyzed that the drop in piglet prices that year was because there were too many piglets on the market, but at that time fattened pigs still sold for more than 2 yuan per jin, so I thought I'd keep raising them for 3 months, and once they grew into fattened pigs there would definitely be profit." Three months later, Zhang Bin's fattened pigs went to market at 2.9 yuan per jin, and he still made a hundred or so yuan per pig.
Through his ups and downs in the market, Zhang Bin became more and more skilled at raising pigs. In 1998, he began researching breed improvement. "The pig breed I raised that year was called 'local two-way cross,' and at the same time I experimentally crossbred a few 'local three-way cross' pigs. Unexpectedly, butchers in the market were willing to pay 5 jiao more per jin for my 'local three-way cross.'" After that, Zhang Bin replaced all the pigs he raised with the "local three-way cross," which had a high slaughter rate and high lean meat rate. And the "local three-way cross breeding sows" he bred himself also spread by word of mouth, attracting people from the surrounding villages and townships to snap them up. He said with some pride: "I sold more than a thousand of these sows in total, and truly made a lot of money."
In 2004, pig prices once again peaked, and Zhang Bin said he "made no small profit." That year fattened pig prices reached more than 5 yuan per jin, while feed prices such as corn and soybean meal were only a few jiao. That year, Zhang Bin made a net profit of 470,000 yuan. By 2007, Zhang Bin once again invested more than 2 million yuan to build the South Pig Farm, with an annual output of 2,000 fattened pigs. And that year and 2008 were again good years for the pig market, with fattened pigs going to market at 9 yuan/jin. As a result, "in two years, the entire investment was recovered."