Why are a million ducks in Nanjing raised suspended in the air?

    Duck farming generally depends on rivers, ditches, ponds and swamps, but reporters learned at yesterday's "Hundred Experts into a Hundred Villages" science and technology achievement promotion meeting that Nanjing will build a high-quality elevated-bed duck-farming demonstration base in Pukou, raising ducks on mesh beds more than one meter high.

Why raise ducks on mesh beds? Can ducks raised "suspended in the air" still taste good? Out of curiosity, the reporter interviewed Du Wenxing, a science and technology special commissioner sent by the Municipal Science and Technology Association to the "elevated-bed duck farming" demonstration base and a professor at Nanjing Agricultural University.

Professor Du introduced that elevated-bed duck farming uses a fully enclosed indoor method, with the mesh bed more than 1 m above the ground. The bed frame and slats of this mesh bed are built from bamboo and wood, with plastic netting laid on top, and a half-meter-high fence must also be built around the outside of the netting frame to prevent the ducks from running around. The entire shed is divided into multiple small pens, and each pen is equipped with a water trough and a feed trough.

Compared with grazing and flat-floor rearing, net rearing of meat ducks has three major advantages. First, it saves labor and is not restricted by the seasons, so ducks can also be raised in winter; second, they grow quickly. Generally, meat ducks can be sent to market in 32 days, with body weight reaching 2 kg; third, there are fewer illnesses. Therefore, it has great value for promotion in rural areas.

Most importantly, "the duck breed is one we cultivated ourselves." Professor Du introduced that varieties currently widely farmed in Nanjing, such as Cherry Valley ducks, are larger in size and tend to have fattier meat. However, Nanjing's local Jinling Black-Beak duck is smaller in size and has tender meat. Therefore, experts selected foreign varieties with better growth performance and local duck breeds for breeding, developing a new variety with moderate size and better meat quality, and they hold the independent intellectual property rights to this variety.

Du Wenxing told reporters that the most distinctive feature is the brooding room. In order to maintain a constant indoor temperature of 33°C, the traditional heating equipment is a coal stove, which pollutes the air and has unstable effects. They use the country's most advanced energy-saving and heat-preserving heating equipment. The heating equipment is placed outdoors and delivers heat into the brooding room through heating pipes, making it clean and efficient. The brooding room also uses mechanical equipment to scrape and clean manure from the floor every day, keeping the room hygienic. In this way, the ducklings raised are highly disease-resistant, and combined with standardized farming, "almost no medicine is used from birth to slaughter."

Because elevated-bed net rearing must supply full-price, high-quality feed throughout the entire growth stage of meat ducks, the expert group also studied feed ratios. This enables the demonstration base to form a complete industrial chain from variety breeding, feed ratios and healthy farming to slaughter and deep processing. "Because it is fully enclosed rearing, the product characteristics are obvious, and it is relatively easy to build into a distinctive brand," the expert introduced. "Osmanthus duck" is a famous brand in Nanjing, and in the future the ducks here will become another new brand of Nanjing duck products.

It is reported that the demonstration base is expected to be completed and put into use by the end of the month. It is designed to send 1 million ducks to market annually, driving 200 farming households to increase their income.

The reporter also learned yesterday that in the 5 years since the "Hundred Experts into a Hundred Villages" project was implemented, 145 new varieties and new technologies have been promoted, and elevated-bed duck farming is one of these new technologies.