Huang Huameng Gets Rich Through Farming

    Huang Huameng, a blind-in-the-right-eye disabled man from Guihua Village, Shigu Township, Tongren City, Guizhou, has been widely praised locally for his strong will despite his disability, supporting himself and getting rich through farming.  
      
    Huang Huameng, 57 this year, is a villager of Qiaobian Group, Guihua Village, Shigu Township, Shiqian County, and has been farming for many years. At the beginning, in order to learn the techniques, besides studying through television, newspapers, magazines and other channels, he also took his son to visit and study in Sinan, Hunan, Jiangkou, Tongren and other places. He would not miss a single training session held by departments such as the county animal husbandry bureau, the poverty alleviation office and the disabled persons' federation. Through the door-to-door, hand-by-hand teaching of technicians from the county breed improvement station, Huang Huameng learned artificial insemination. Relying on this technique, over 11 years he served farmers within a 22-kilometer radius, as far as Luopo in Jiangkou and Yangxi in Yinjiang.  
      
    2005 was an unforgettable year in Huang Huameng's farming career. That year, his family was raising more than 60 sows, market prices were sluggish, while feed prices were soaring, and Huang Huameng was racking his brains over the funding problem. To ease the financial pressure, when no one would even take them for free, Huang Huameng painfully discarded sixty or seventy piglets. At the same time, to ease market risks, Huang Huameng also took more than 30 sows to Jiangkou to raise, keeping half at home. He had thought the situation in the neighboring county would be a bit better, but unexpectedly it was the same. After struggling in Jiangkou for a year, he brought the sows back and began selling them at low prices. In the end, only 15 sows were left, unwanted because of their poor growth.  
      
    Huang Huameng never dreamed that it was these 15 unwanted sows that would bring a turning point to his farming. When these 15 sows were due to give birth to piglets, market prices soared. With the market price at 22 yuan/jin, Huang Huameng sold at only 18 yuan/jin, and farmers from far and near rushed to buy; the 15 sows brought him an income of nearly 200,000 yuan. As soon as the market improved, Huang Huameng's confidence in farming grew even stronger. Having studied regularly, he well understood the importance of breed improvement. When the county animal husbandry bureau promoted binary crossbred sows at 3,000 yuan/head, he immediately ordered 10. After the sleek, glossy breeding sows were brought back, Huang Huameng liked them so much that he would even get up in the middle of the night to look at them in the pigpen. Now, he raises a total of 28 breeding sows, 3 breeding boars and more than 200 piglets, and this year he invested another 220,000 yuan to build a new pig house.  
      
    Recently, speaking of his farming income, Huang Huameng likes to joke, "That group of pigs of mine has bought me another car." It is a joke, but it is truly a fact. In recent years, relying on farming, Huang Huameng helped his youngest son, who works in Hunan, buy a Haima sedan, and also helped his eldest son invest more than 300,000 yuan to open a new home appliance supermarket in Shigu. In March this year, for the convenience of farming and home appliance delivery, Huang Huameng bought a new Dongfeng vehicle. During the interview, Huang Huameng happily told this writer that last night another sow had given birth to 19 piglets, selling casually at 600 to 700 yuan each, bringing in yet another ten thousand yuan or more.  
      
    Huang Huameng, now well-off, is not conservative. As the group leader, he teaches techniques to visiting farmers without reservation, and gives away some materials and discs for free. For those who do not farm, when doing persuasion work, Huang Huameng always likes to do the math for them, saying that if a family raises five or six sows at home, each sow brings an annual income of ten thousand yuan; apart from spending twenty or thirty thousand yuan, they would still have twenty or thirty thousand yuan left over. If they went out to work, how could they earn that much in a year? Moreover, when they get older, who would want to hire them?  
      
    Last year, Huang Huameng's farm was designated by Shigu Township as a Party member demonstration post for industrial development in the activities of the Year of Grassroots Party Organization Construction. Under his demonstration and leadership, all 38 households in the group now raise pigs, with more than 200 commercial pigs marketed annually.