Farmer helps others hatch their dreams

Updated: 2011-09-30 11:06

By Liu Nanxue (China Daily Anhui Bureau)

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A female village farmer is helping others to realize their dreams by raising chickens for profit in a once impoverish county.

"My biggest dream is to be a vocational agent to create a chicken brand," said Dong Guangwu, a female farmer who has raised chickens for five years in Xinyuan village, Changfeng county in Hefei, provincial capital of East China's Anhui province.

"Although the cooperative which I set up in 2007 has not been given a trademark, I never gave up the dream of leading other local women, so called stay-at-home wives, to raise organic and healthy chickens." Five years ago, Dong raised 1,500 chickens and received a yearly income of nearly 20,000 yuan ($3129). This year, she set up the cooperative of raising chickens and recruited six local female villagers with the support of Gangji Township government at Changfeng County.

"Nowadays, we have raised more than 15,000 chickens," Dong said happily, adding they are full of hope. "Dong's story is only one of the typical stories in this county. Many other villagers have benefited from the policy of improving people's livelihood and finally realized their dreams of becoming wealthy", said Chen Yan, director of External Publicity Office in the Publicity Department of Changfeng County Committee of the Communist Party of China. Changfeng County, a onetime national poor county, has become one of the top 10 counties in Anhui province. Several townships of the county, including Gangji, Shuangdun and Shuihu, are in the list of top 100 townships in Anhui province. Chen noted that a total of 332 projects, which focus on improving people's living standards, especially local farmers, have been undertaken by the Changfeng government in 2011.

"As the hometown of strawberry, our county has held the festival of strawberry for nine years while other crops like potatoes, pumpkins and white gourds are also the major crops which have been widely planted," she added, stressing that "our dream is to be one of the top 100 counties in the whole country during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015)."