How does Wang Xianyu, the "Rat Farming King", farm rats?
"Rural areas, like cities, offer room to put one's talents to use." In the eyes of Wang Xianyu, who spent years striving in coastal areas, the countryside where he was born and raised was better suited to his development. So he returned to the countryside to develop farming, moving from farming bamboo rats to raising pigs,geese, and setting up a small feed mill, initially forming an integrated farming operation. Through his own entrepreneurial experience, he tells everyone: whether seeking employment or starting a business, as long as you find a path suited to your development, rural areas also offer room to put your talents to use.
Wang Xianyu, the "Rat Farming King"
After graduation, he went to Shenzhen full of confidence, yet suffered repeated setbacks
Wang Xianyu comes from a remote rural village in Wan'an County, Ji'an City, and is one of the few college students in his village. After graduating in 2004 with a degree in software engineering from East China Institute of Technology, he went to Shenzhen full of confidence to seek development. He had thought that a software engineering degree would make it very easy to find a satisfactory job, but it was completely beyond his expectations. After several setbacks, Wang Xianyu finally managed to find a job as a software engineer. In his spare time, he worked part-time at a computer repair shop. Once, Wang Xianyu got into an argument with a customer, and in the end it finished with him being beaten, paying compensation, and apologizing. Through this incident, Wang Xianyu realized that his simple, honest nature was very ill-suited to city life. Perhaps his familiar hometown was better suited to him, so he began to keep an eye out for projects suitable for development back home.
A meal with friends led him to a business opportunity for returning home to start a business
In 2008, at a meal with friends, Wang Xianyu tasted a dish of braised bamboo rat. The "bamboo rat", also known as the blind-headed rat, is a wild animal that mainly eats bamboo roots and reeds. "Isn't this the kind of rat I used to dig out of the bamboo groves with my father when I was little? I never imagined it would become a delicacy on the dining table, and not cheap either, at 280 yuan a plate." While surprised, he also saw a business opportunity: his hometown has abundant wild bamboo rat resources, a superior geographical environment, and the feed that bamboo rats need, and bamboo rats fetch a high price, with large demand from restaurants big and small! Farming them was undoubtedly a good choice.
Immediately, he went to Guangxi and Hunan, major provinces for bamboo rat farming, and learned that bamboo rats are a new type of farming industry with high development value, large market demand, small investment, low risk, and high economic returns. Through careful analysis, Wang Xianyu believed that farming bamboo rats had great prospects. Without further delay, he returned to his hometown and used his own house to build rat pens and buy breeding stock. Just like that, farming officially began, and he went from being an IT professional to a farmer, shuttling among the various rearing rooms every day, putting out feed, washing dishes, and cleaning up, doing all the tasks big and small himself.
Striving to improve farming techniques, with output value doubling
In order to master farming techniques as quickly as possible, Wang Xianyu bought a large amount of books and materials, went online every day to look up information about bamboo rats, and worked hard to improve his farming techniques. In just over half a year, his bamboo rats grew from the original 40 to the current 300. According to the growth pattern of bamboo rats, their reproduction increases geometrically. Although the sales of the first batch of market rats amounted to less than 20,000 yuan, what made him happy was that, at the current reproduction rate, within a year he could achieve an output value of over 100,000 yuan.
In raising bamboo rats, besides needing coarse feed such as moso bamboo and reeds, they also need to be fed some concentrated feed such as corn, soybean meal, and bran. If too much concentrated feed is mixed, the bamboo rats cannot finish it and it will spoil; if too little, it is not enough to eat. In order to ensure a normal supply of concentrated feed while also achieving diversified operations, Wang Xianyu built a pig farm and a feed mill. Now an integrated farming operation has initially taken shape. Although the current scale is not large, in a year it can grow to 3,000 bamboo rats, 2,000 meat pigs, and 20,000 geese, with an output value of more than 4 million yuan, and at the same time it can also help the surrounding villagers get rich together.
Wang Xianyu says: "Although the conditions for starting a business in rural areas are tough, I have no regrets, because I have found work suited to me and identified the direction for development. I believe that whether seeking employment or starting a business, as long as it suits your own development, then rural areas, like cities, offer us room to put our talents to use."