Yang Shanbiao's Dream-Chasing Story on the Road of Hare Farming
On a hillside where Xiaozhi Town borders Huaqiao Town in Sanmen County, with plenty of sunlight and a mild climate, Yang Shanbiao's Nanfengkeng Hare Farm is located, covering about 50 mu, with wild vegetables and weeds everywhere. Hearing the sound, hares darted out from the grass one after another, with a rustling sound all around.
Yang Shanbiao is 34 years old this year. After being demobilized from the armed police force in 2002, he first worked at a factory in the town. After a few years, he felt there was no future in it. At that time, the concept of developing ecological agriculture in rural areas was emerging, and Xiaozhi Town had many barren hills, most of which had not been developed or utilized. Yang Shanbiao sensed keenly that this was an opportunity. In 2005, he quit his factory job, contracted a seven-to-eight-mu hillside near his home, and prepared to go into farming.
His idea did not gain his family's agreement at first. However, Yang Shanbiao firmly believed it was feasible. Under all kinds of pressure, he went ahead vigorously with 50,000 yuan he had borrowed. He first raised chickens, but unexpectedly that year avian influenza raged, and the prices of chickens, ducks and other poultry plummeted overnight. A 2-kg local chicken sold for 15 yuan and still found no buyer. He took a big fall right at the start, and Yang Shanbiao truly felt he was somewhat at a dead end.
Once, he accidentally saw information online about hare farming. Hares feed mainly on natural pasture grass, are pollution-free, and have delicious meat with a strong gamey flavor. They are a green health food, and because the meat is high in protein and low in fat, it is also called "beauty meat" and "health meat." There has long been a saying, "Among birds, none beats the partridge; among beasts, none beats the hare." Most importantly, raising hares requires low investment, which gave the then penniless Yang Shanbiao hope. After making contact, the next day he went to Fujian to buy breeding rabbits. "I bought 20 in total, and 4 died on the bus back." The remaining 16 hares became the hope for Yang Shanbiao's second round of entrepreneurship.
With no money to hire workers, he cut grass and fed the rabbits himself, but his skills were not refined, and all the newborn hares died. Due to excessive fatigue and heavy mental pressure, during that period Yang Shanbiao's weight suddenly dropped from 60 kg to 49 kg.
"A person can be defeated, but not conquered." This sentence encouraged Yang Shanbiao. He consulted rabbit-raising books, sought advice from rabbit-raising experts, constantly observed, summed up experience, and explored the living patterns and eating habits of hares. As a result, his farming techniques became better and better. Last year, he contracted another hillside located in Nanfengkeng and adopted ecological free-range farming for the hares, without feeding them compound feed, and specially planted various grasses and vegetables that hares love to eat. Hygiene is very important in hare farming. Yang Shanbiao planted bayberry, peach, pear and other fruit trees on the mountain, and the hares' droppings became natural fertilizer for the fruit trees.
Hares have strong reproductive capacity. A female hare breeds 4 to 5 litters on average each year, with 5 to 8 per litter. At most, one hare gave birth to 10 in a single litter. At the same time, hares grow very fast. Generally, after 5 months of raising they can be marketed, and each female hare can breed at least more than 25 per year. At most, Yang Shanbiao's farm developed to more than 3,000 finished rabbits and 600 breeding rabbits. As the scale grew, one person could not handle it all, so he called his younger sister, who was working in Ningbo, back home to help. At the beginning of this year, he also persuaded his father, who was working in Huangyan. Seeing the thriving farm, the family's earlier objections had long since disappeared without a trace.
Yang Shanbiao understands that nowadays, developing agriculture cannot be done by working hard with one's head down alone; there must be a brand. For this reason, he registered the Guishan brand hare trademark and also set up the Zhejiang Hare website. By sending breeding rabbits to several farmers near Xiaozhi Town, he gradually expanded the overall scale of hare farming in Xiaozhi. Seizing the opportunity, he also established the Linhai Huali Hare Professional Cooperative, which not only provides farming techniques and information services to surrounding farmers, but also uniformly purchases hares raised by individual households and sells them externally in a unified way. It became a well-known hare farming base far and wide, attracting farming specialists from various places to place orders for breeding rabbits, and hotels coming to buy hare meat in an endless stream.
Not only that, at the bottom of this hillside there are several natural ditches, and Yang Shanbiao plans to make full use of them to develop stonefrogfarming. At present, the breeding ponds have been built, and operation is planned to begin in the second half of the year. "Using hare droppings to breed earthworms as natural food for the stonefrog, they will soon reproduce offspring, ultimately forming an ecological three-dimensional farming model of 'planting fruit trees on the mountain, free-ranging hares on the hillside, and raising stone frogs at the foot of the mountain.'"
"Compared with traditional farming methods, the three-dimensional farming model brings greater benefits," Yang Shanbiao said. For him, success has only just begun, and the road ahead is still long.