Yang Dongjiao Turns Silkie Chickens into Golden Phoenixes

    Walking into Xianyutou Pond in Wugen Town, Wenling City, Zhejiang Province, an old revolutionary base area, you will find a modern White Silkie breeding chicken farm rising here. The owners of the breeding farm are a farmer couple. The man is Chen Renfu, chairman of Wenling Hexing Poultry Co., Ltd.; the woman is Yang Dongjiao, head of the Wenling Xinghe Poultry Cooperative and general manager of the company. The two have led farmers in the old revolutionary base area to scientifically raise White Silkie chickens, becoming "Wenling City Top Ten Marketing Households" and "Zhejiang Province Women's Brand Marketing Households" . Yang Dongjiao was elected as a "Wenling City Party Representative" and has been rated as "Wenling City Model Worker," "Taizhou City Entrepreneurial and Innovative Woman Expert," and "National Double Learning and Double Comparing Woman Expert."

Yang Dongjiao, general manager of Zhejiang Wenling Hexing Poultry Co., Ltd., leads employees in packaging Silkie eggs for export. (Source: China Breeding Network)

Difficult Beginnings

When they had just married, her husband Chen Renfu suffered from a severe spinal disease and could not do heavy work. Yang Dongjiao took on all the heavy work at home during the day, and at night she still did embroidery by lamplight, working day and night desperately to earn money. Yang Dongjiao borrowed 50 yuan from the Wugen credit union, bought a piglet, and began raising pigs. Later she opened a foundry, which soon folded due to environmental pollution. In 1995, her pig-raising operation grew to more than 300 head, but due to pig disease, not a single one of the 300-plus pigs could be sold, and she suddenly lost hundreds of thousands of yuan. Yang Dongjiao did not lose heart. She discussed it with her husband: if pig farming would not work, they would specialize in raising chickens. So they bought a batch of Sanhuang breeding chickens. Once, while hatching chicks in the incubation room, an electric light bulb exploded, the incubation room caught fire, and more than 50,000 yuan of feed money placed in a coat pocket was reduced to ashes. Not long after, the more than 8,000 Sanhuang chickens they were raising were frightened to death or crushed to death in a wild animal attack, and in the end only a little more than 1,000 remained. Opening a factory, raising pigs, hatching chickens, one failure after another, nothing went smoothly, and every kind of unlucky thing happened to this couple, Yang Dongjiao and her husband.

Failure is the mother of success. Yang Dongjiao summed up the experience and lessons, and at the end of 1996 borrowed money again to buy 800 White Silkie breeding chickens. This time she won a complete victory. Breeding eggs sold for as high as 44 yuan per kilogram, and the next year she made a net profit of more than 200,000 yuan.

Although the Wugen old revolutionary base area (the base area of the Second Division of the Red Thirteenth Army) was not industrially developed, it had no pollution, and it rapidly developed into one of the largest chicken-raising bases in Taizhou. But after 1997, chicken farmers rushed in all at once, and many of them suffered serious losses. Yang Dongjiao, who was also raising chickens, relied on her own unique insight and felt that the main reason chicken farmers had poor returns was that marketing was disconnected. So she and her husband became live-chicken marketers. 
When they first started marketing chickens, Yang Dongjiao and her husband had no experience at all, so they helped a boss in Yuhuan County buy chickens. For every 1 kilogram of chickens they helped the Yuhuan boss purchase, they got a 0.2 yuan service fee, and they did this for several months, accumulating a little capital. Later, a boss in Wenzhou asked Yang Dongjiao and her husband to purchase Sanhuang chickens and White Silkie chickens for him. Then customers from Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Guangdong, Fujian and other places all established cooperative relationships with her and built a good marketing network. During the two years of 2000 and 2001, Yang Dongjiao and her husband sold an average of nearly 10,000 commercial chickens per day for chicken farmers in Wenling and Yuhuan; in 2002, they sold more than 2 million high-quality chickens for farmers, increasing farmers' income by more than 20 million yuan.

Striving Forward in Big Strides

In order to align with the international market and lead chicken farmers to prosperity together, in early 2002, with the help of the Wenling City Supply and Marketing Cooperative, Yang Dongjiao established the Wenling Xinghe Poultry Cooperative. There were 31 farming households joining the cooperative, driving more than 600 chicken-raising households. At present, the cooperative's membership has grown to 117 households, driving more than 1,000 farming households. The cooperative has a standardized breeding chicken farm of more than 10,000 sq m. Hexing Poultry Company has built a 600 sq m hatching hall, introduced matching fully automatic incubators, and immediately after chicks hatch, they are sorted by sex and then given vaccine injections. At present, it can produce 7.2 million high-quality chicks and 7.2 million commercial chickens annually, driving farmers in economically underdeveloped mountainous areas such as Wugen Town, Chengnan Town and Shiqiaotou Town to raise Silkie chickens and become prosperous together.

In August 2002, in order to get Silkie chickens and Silkie eggs into the international market, Chen Renfu and Yang Dongjiao invested 150,000 yuan and introduced 20,000 high-quality White Silkie breeding chickens from Hong Kong, China, and also invested more than 200,000 yuan. Apart from what they raised themselves each month, all the rest was supplied to cooperative members to raise, providing pre-production, mid-production and post-production services for cooperative members and other farming households, leading farmers onto the road of common prosperity. The 117 cooperative member households had an average net income of more than 100,000 yuan each, with the highest reaching 180,000 yuan. Before long, Wenling Hexing Poultry Development Co., Ltd., with Chen Renfu as chairman, was also established. With the company as the leader and farming households as workshops, the 117 cooperative members were 117 production workshops, with each production link closely connected to the next. Yang Dongjiao uniformly provided chicks, uniformly supplied feed, uniformly applied enterprise standards, uniformly carried out epidemic prevention, uniformly used the brand, and uniformly handled sales, producing a brand effect. Yang Dongjiao focused on pollution-free, safe, green and organic production of White Silkie chickens. The Silkie chicken feed was all processed and produced by themselves, ensuring pollution-free, green and safe production throughout the entire process. The White Silkie chickens produced had pure quality, a moderate growth rate, good feed conversion efficiency and remarkable economic benefits. Silkie chickens sold well in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei and other provinces and cities. "Yuanliuliu" brand Silkie eggs sold well across the country. Starting in the second half of 2008, "Yuanliuliu" brand Silkie eggs were also exported to Hong Kong, China and France. In the French market, one White Silkie egg sold for as high as 1.5 euros.