Female College-Graduate Village Official Raises Locusts; Grasshoppers Become a Famous Dish: "Flying Locusts Rising to Prosperity"
"Grasshoppers, grasshoppers, leave only stubble behind." This farming proverb has pinned on this six-legged little insect a "negative image" it can never shake off for life. Mention it, and many people will think of locust plagues. Building greenhouses to raise locusts is, in the eyes of ordinary farmers, an utterly absurd thing to do, but in the Yellow River beach area of Huayuankou in Zhengzhou, a pretty girl has really taken up the business of raising locusts. This 25-year-old girl is Sheng Caiyun, assistant to the village committee director of Gongzhuang Village, Yingbin Road Subdistrict Office, Huiji District, and a college-graduate village official.
Sheng Caiyun mends and reinforces the greenhouse.
"Collecting" food for the locusts.
Sheng Caiyun constantly observes the living habits of the locusts.
The formerly menacing locusts.
This is the famous dish "Flying Locusts Rising to Prosperity."
Locusts contain very rich nutrients, including organic substances such as protein, fat, carbohydrates and so on, as well as large amounts of free amino acids and vitamins needed by the human body; inorganic substances include various salts, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, iron, calcium and so on. In addition, they are also rich in chitin, which can remove toxins from the human body and has the effect of detoxifying and beautifying the skin.
At 5 a.m. on July 20, crickets in the fields chirped from time to time. The 25-year-old Sheng Caiyun stood outside the greenhouses, intently listening to the sounds from several greenhouses. The rustling sounds inside gradually grew softer, and she led two villagers to pick up dip nets and mugwort and walk into the greenhouse...
What they were going to catch was nothing rare, but in their eyes the hundreds of jin of locusts in the greenhouse were all treasures. In the greenhouse were a million locusts, 75 days of feeding, and over a thousand jin of forage. The locusts caught today were a heavy harvest.
Raising locusts was not a sudden whim. Sheng Caiyun normally paid great attention to using the rural distance-education network to check information. In the first half of 2007, she learned from market information on the distance-education network that in many places across the country, locusts had become a green food favored by people at the dining table, selling for several dozen yuan per kilogram, with very good prospects. This piece of information gave Sheng Caiyun a sudden inspiration. Gongzhuang Village is right next to the Yellow River beach area, so there was no worry about space or forage, and nearby there were several dozen farmhouse restaurants featuring wild game. With such good conditions, why not lead the villagers to raise locusts and get rich? After several months of breeding practice, Sheng Caiyun decided to start raising locusts.
Sheng Caiyun purchased more than 320 jin of locust eggs from Shandong, and bought bamboo poles, gauze netting and zippers, setting up 6 locust greenhouses in the Yellow River beach area and beginning to work energetically.
In May last year, she and several villagers took 5 kilograms of locusts to the area along the Yellow River in Zhengzhou where farmhouse leisure restaurants are concentrated, to promote them. They gave them free to diners to taste, and gave them a catchy name, "Flying Locusts Rising to Prosperity," letting diners score the taste. The diners were full of interest in this novel food and praised it endlessly after tasting it. The restaurant owners felt there was profit to be made, so they began to buy them. From then on, some restaurants along the Yellow River and in the urban area added a signature dish, "Flying Locusts Rising to Prosperity." Not long after, a customer in Guangzhou heard about it and specifically called to say they would take as many as were available.
"Locusts are actually very easy to raise. Just put the eggs into the greenhouse, ensure sufficient forage that is not contaminated by pesticides, and the locusts can survive and reproduce. My 6 greenhouses use two or three hundred jin of grass every day. I plant Mexican corn grass and millet around the greenhouses and hire people to harvest them; nothing else needs to be managed. There are three harvests a year, and the locusts are fully grown. Now nearby restaurants are scrambling to buy them. We sell for 20 yuan per jin, and they all sold out." Sheng Caiyun said that her personal investment was only a few thousand yuan, and she earned more than 10,000 yuan. Han Jianjun in the village invested more and earned more than 30,000 yuan. Seeing that raising locusts could also make money, some villagers had already begun planning to raise them along with her. At present, dealers from aquatic product wholesale markets in other places are constantly negotiating orders with Sheng Caiyun, and one in Shandong alone hopes to purchase 5 tons of locusts.