Chicken breeding bolsters Dahua's poverty alleviation work

Qibainong Chickens, which are a famous specialty of Dahua Yao autonomous county in Hechi, has helped lift more than 50,000 impoverished people in the county out of poverty.

Qibainong has a long history of chicken breeding. The township is located in a deep depression area in a cluster of peaks, boasting excellent ecology and fresh air, which are good for breeding chickens with delicious meat and rich nutrition.

At present, Dahua has four breeding farms of Qibainong chickens, with more than 50,000 breeders. Qibainong chicken breeding has changed from single-hen hatching to large-scale machine production, with an annual production of more than 5 million chickens.

Dahua has followed the development path of bolstering the quality of Qibainong chickens. It has formulated and issued the Qibainong chicken breeding technical regulations, as well as established a product quality inspection system and a quality certification system for Qibainong chickens.

"We raise each chicken for 150 days with corn meal and probiotics to ensure high quality," said Mo Lixi, director of the Dahua Qibainong Chicken Industry Office.

In January 2017, Qibainong chicken won recognition as a National Geographical Indication Product by the Ministry of Agriculture.

In 2018, Dahua established and implemented a poverty alleviation development model for the Qibainong chicken industry to solve the bottleneck of industrial development in mountainous areas through the joint introduction of rural organizations, the joint construction of multi-household cooperatives, joint management and breeding, as well as the joint sharing of benefits. Its development model also incorporated unified seedling purchases, skills training, anti-COVID-19 epidemic services, management and feeding services, as well as unified pricing and sales.

Currently, the county has built 158 poverty alleviation Qibainong chicken farms. This year, the number of chickens bred has reached 2 million, which has lifted 13,968 people of 3,492 impoverished households out of poverty, with an average annual income increase of over 1,000 yuan ($151.21).

In order to open up the sales market, the main leaders of Dahua have promoted Qibainong chicken in Shenzhen, Beijing, and other places. Moreover, the county has also built a cold chain logistics service center to sell the chickens through e-commerce platforms.