Large-scale leech farming: An interview with Zhou Weimin of the Wujiang Mingxing Industry Breeding Center

    His "irregularity" is a mindset different from ordinary people, a determination to press on in the face of difficulties different from ordinary people, and a persistence in exploration different from ordinary people in order to achieve his goals!

    Because of a single remark from a friend, he went to fields and ponds to catch wild leeches, only to find that they had long since been caught almost clean by many farmers! It turned out that at the time, the price of live leeches used to produce medicinal materials was around 0.6 yuan each.

    So, starting in 2000, he bought several thousand leeches from local farmers at 0.7 yuan each and dug ponds in his own family plot to begin breeding and experimenting.

    He kept at it for 10 years.

    Over 10 years, he worked out the key technical steps of leech farming, from breeding and egg cocoon hatching to rearing the seedlings, and changed the extensive large-pond leech farming model into a factory-style farming model suited to leech growth and reproduction and easy for farmers to operate and manage……

    Now, when the huge market demand for leeches calls out to him, he has begun to move from closed-door farming to open farming and has put forward the business approach of "enterprise + farming branch sites + farming households."

    When many people learned about him and about his leech farm, and people from all walks of life came one after another to visit his leech farming base, it was less a verification of Zhou Weimin's exploration on the road of leech farming than a pursuit of and yearning for wealth. And for us, it is a hope to seek a direction of wealth creation suited to farming households.

10 years of exploration: The factory-style leech farming model shows a dawn of hope

  ——An interview with Zhou Weimin and Shi Youyou, General Manager of the Wujiang Mingxing Industry Breeding Center

    To turn a business opportunity into business returns, besides needing a persistent spirit, what is needed even more is keen thinking and a mind good at reflection!

    Reporter (hereafter "Ji"): The leech is a precious medicinal resource. Judging from the future development of the pharmaceutical market, many people believe market demand is huge. But people are more inclined to listen to the voices of those who have practiced it themselves, because these people best understand the connection between production and the market. As a practitioner who has struggled and grown up in leech farming, what judgment and analysis do you have about the leech farm?

    Zhou Weimin (hereafter "Zhou"): The leech is a scarce and precious traditional Chinese medicinal material both at home and abroad, and can treat traumatic injuries, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease and tumors, among others. Its medicinal value determines its future market situation. From the perspective of the consumer market, our country was the earliest to use leeches. With the development of domestic medicine and the further development of the leech's medicinal value, demand for leeches is growing day by day. In addition, the European and American consumer markets are very large. Japan, Korea and the countries of Southeast Asia also import large quantities of leeches from our country, causing a shortage in the domestic leech market and rising prices. Especially in 1999, the contradiction between supply and demand was particularly prominent, and the price of clear-water live leeches was 80 yuan per kilogram. Because at that time leeches basically came from natural harvesting.