Why is frog farmer Li Chenlong known as the Frog King?

    I met Li Chenlong at his bullfrog farm. He is 20 years old this year and lives at No. 608 Kangzang Road in the city proper. His family is well-off, and both of his parents are civil servants in the city. At this moment, he looked no different from an ordinary rural young man. After more than half a year of rural life in the sun and rain, his skin had become slightly dark, and he looked a little mature for his age. If someone had not told me in advance, I would never have guessed that the owner of the frog farm was a 2008 graduate of the Sichuan Archives School.

Li Chenlong shows the bullfrogs he raises.

Going to Zhejiang to learn the trade before graduation

    Li Chenlong's frog farm is located in Gonghe Village, Shangli Town, Yucheng District, surrounded by a large expanse of farmland. He said that he chose this place in the first place because the air and water sources here are both relatively good and suitable for raising bullfrogs, and now it seems that he chose the right location.

    Although Li Chenlong grew up in the city, he has had a strong interest in the countryside since childhood. He likes the willows swaying in rural areas and the chirping of insects and birds in the fields.

    Before graduation, Li Chenlong went alone to a bullfrog breeding base in Lin'an, Zhejiang, where he spent a year learning frog farming techniques. After acquiring the skills, he immediately went home to plan his own frog farm.

    Before he returned from Zhejiang, his parents had already helped him find a pretty good job in the city proper, but he insisted on going to the countryside to raise frogs. Li Chenlong's actions met with firm opposition from his parents, relatives, and friends. His relatives and friends thought he was crazy: there were plenty of jobs he could have taken, yet he insisted on going to the countryside to be a farmer. But Li Chenlong had made up his mind, and no one could persuade him otherwise. He believed that specialized farming in rural areas was still a weak link, and that, combined with the broad prospects of the frog market, as long as his techniques were up to standard and costs were saved, the future would certainly be bright.

Borrowing money to start a frog farm

    After some time, Li Chenlong's persistence changed the attitude of his family and friends. With tens of thousands of yuan borrowed from relatives and friends, Li Chenlong rented a village house, contracted a piece of wasteland, built a house, and bought 42 pairs of breeding frogs. In January this year, his ecological breeding farm was finally established. With no helpers, bringing in feed, feeding the frogs, and changing the water in the ponds all depended on him alone. He worked from dawn to dusk every day, and at night he slept in a simple little hut at the frog farm.

    In the frog ponds, small frog heads could be seen bobbing up and down everywhere. Li Chenlong told this reporter that he now has 20 intensive breeding ponds, with more than 2,000 frogs of various sizes and more than 10,000 tadpoles in the ponds. Although the benefits will not become apparent until two years later, based on the current profit of just over 20 yuan per kilogram for bullfrogs, the future value will keep rising. Because they are ecological frogs, besides being fed feed to which absolutely no antibiotics are added, they alone eat dozens of jin of earthworms every day. In order to breed large numbers of the earthworms needed for the bullfrogs, he often goes to the village to collect cow dung. Whenever this matter is mentioned, the villagers of Gonghe Village all marvel at his diligence, and the villagers have gradually come to understand that this young man from the city is not acting on a mere whim. As a result, many curious villagers, or those drawn by his reputation, came to visit and learn from him.

    Li Chenlong wants to wait until he has income and then hold training classes in the village, freely passing on ecological frog-farming techniques to those who come to learn. Pointing to the vast stretches of farmland around him, he said that in the future he also wants to plant various fruit trees and vegetables here, and raise some pigs, cattle, and sheep. My ultimate goal is to build this into a modern ecological farm. That was my dream when I was a student.