Few people pay attention to the slow trial of earthworm farming. What if it succeeds?

Born in a peasant family in Laibin City, Guangxi, Weishou finally jumped out of the agricultural door to study philosophy at Guangxi University, but did not stay in the city as a white-collar worker as expected after graduation. Instead, he brought his girlfriend to Pingyang Town, Yinhai District, Beihai City to deal with mud and started earthworm farming.

From being poor and destitute, to buying a house in Beihai, getting married and having children, and driving more than 10 farmers around them to grow rich together, it only took Wei Shou more than two years. During this period, he and his entrepreneurial wife not only had to face a lot of unimaginable dirt and tiredness, but also faced great technical and market risks, but fortunately they all survived.

"studying philosophy allows me to see things from a distance." Wei Shou said that although earthworm farming has nothing to do with his philosophy major, whether a thing can be done successfully or not often has a lot to do with the vision and mind of the doer.

The first university graduate in Guangxi to sell earthworms to other provinces.

"philosophy is the most unpopular and difficult major to find a job, and Guangxi University is the only one in Guangxi to offer this class." Wei Shou said bluntly that the students in the class either took the postgraduate entrance examination or studied the second major.

While studying in college, Wei Shou looked for a variety of internship opportunities in society, including human resources, liquor sales, and helped with loans and insurance in an external bank. After trying a variety of jobs, he found that this was not what he wanted.

After graduating in 2012, Wei came to Beihai with his girlfriend and started working in an agricultural company run by a friend. Under the guidance of the company boss, Wei Shou, who has loved raising birds and turtles since childhood, suddenly found a breeding project he was interested in-raising earthworms.

Earthworms can be used as medicine and fish bait, and earthworm manure is a high-quality organic fertilizer, and the period of earthworm culture is short and effective, which is in line with the social development trend of environmental protection and recycling. While working in the company, Wei Shou went to the surrounding mature breeding base to study and study, went to bookstores and searched for various technical materials on the Internet, and spent eight months on research and preparation.

At that time, domestic earthworm farming had formed a large scale in the northern region, but there were not many people in Guangxi. Because the rainy season in the north is concentrated in July and August, it can be raised in open fields on a large scale, and the local developed animal husbandry provides an adequate source of manure for earthworm breeding, while in the south it rains all the year round, earthworms are afraid of rain, and greenhouses must be built, and breeding materials are also relatively limited. all these increase the cost of breeding.

After analysis, Weishou also found that the subtropical region has many unique advantages: Guangxi has high temperatures in the four seasons, and it can be farmed for several more months each year than in the north. Although the overall cost is higher than that in the north, the yield per mu is also higher. Through various inquiries, he found the local waste residue after processing ethanol with cassava chips in Beihai and Qinzhou, which is especially suitable for earthworm breeding.

Although it is well prepared, it is still fraught with difficulties in practice. Wei Shou still remembers that he finally pooled more than 20,000 yuan to buy back the first batch of seedlings, a large number of them died that night, losing more than 3000 yuan. "it was later discovered that when they learned from farmers before, they did not want the technology to be spread abroad, and the guidance given to us was relatively conservative, which led to problems in the handling of base materials."

Raising funds is a difficult problem that every entrepreneur will encounter. Relying on the advantage of participating in more clubs during his college years, Wei Shou mobilized around with his roommates and group friends and raised tens of thousands of yuan of upfront investment. With the help of Wei Shou's wife, who graduated from the College of Arts of Guangxi University, the two took part in an entrepreneurial competition held in Tianjin. Because the project plan was well considered, the live speech and PPT presentation were also in place. Their project won the second prize of the competition and received an interest-free loan of 150000 yuan from the organizers.

With this money, they built greenhouses, bought forklifts and tricycles, and mobilized surrounding farmers to breed them to form economies of scale.

How to open the market is the biggest difference between college graduates Wei Shou and traditional farmers. Many traditional farmers rely on dealers for door-to-door purchases, but dealers often keep the purchase price very low, resulting in very thin profits or even losses. And Wei Shou thought of using the network, he released the sales information to the relevant forums, post bar, soon there will be non-local businesses to contact him to purchase.

"although there were some relatively small customers at the beginning, it was very critical for us to solve the cash flow problem at the beginning of our business." Wei Shou said that at that time, they were the only ones in Guangxi who dared to ship goods to other places. In order to reduce logistics costs, they went to the stations to inquire, looking for long-distance cars with the right running time. When the goods were first shipped to other places, due to lack of experience, earthworms often died due to the heating of packing boxes, or were not tightly sealed, and earthworms climbed into the trunk of long-distance vehicles.

Looking back on that experience, Wei Shou described it as "really the accumulation of blood and tears." he was often scolded by station drivers and often reissued earthworms to customers from other places at a loss. Because of his sincerity, some customers also instructed him how to release soil and ice when packing.

Wei Shou's sincerity is also reflected in his magnanimity, each piece of 20 jin of goods, he will often give an extra jin when delivering the goods. His reputation has accumulated in the industry, and more and more customers are asking him for goods. Now Weishou's earthworms have been sold to Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, Zhejiang and many other provinces.

Optimism and persistence that the typhoon can't blow away.

Just when Wei Shou's earthworm farming career began to get on the right track, a sudden typhoon pulled him back from the peak of entrepreneurship to the bottom of the valley.

On July 19, 2014, Super Typhoon Weimasun made landfall in the Beibu Gulf with winds of force 12 to 13. On the night of the typhoon, fearing that the greenhouse would be blown out, Wei Shou stayed in the nearby dormitory all night.

There is a real-time report of Typhoon Weimasun on the local forum in Beihai. Wei still remembers that when he was browsing the forum that night, the weather forecast said the wind was force 13 at first, but soon it became force 15, and finally the maximum wind became force 17. In the rickety dormitory, the sound of steel pipes falling not far away was heard in his ears from time to time.

As the wind calmed down in the middle of the night, Wei Shou ventured to open the door and got into the van against the wind and rain, trying to drive to the shed to have a look at the situation. As soon as he went out, his headlamp was damaged by the rain. He staggered into the car and dared not pull the handbrake. "I'm afraid a rickshaw will fly!"

After waiting for a long time, the wind calmed down a little, and when he drove to the shed, it was as if he had been through a world war. Everything except the skeleton of the shed was blown away. "at that time, it was no longer a question of whether or not to make money, but a matter of keeping one's life." Worried that the steel pipe on the greenhouse would continue to be smashed, Wei Shou parked his car and ran back to the dormitory with his head in his arms.

As the roof was overturned, coupled with a power outage for more than 10 days, earthworms farmed in the shed died in large areas. Weishou had no goods to sell for five months in a row, and the loss that year amounted to more than 200,000 yuan.

After the typhoon, seven or eight farmers in Beihai who followed Weishou to raise earthworms expressed their unwillingness to raise them any more. But Wei Shou didn't give up. "to be honest, we young people have no other capital except youth." Slowly reproduce, one into two, two into four, so that all can be restored in half a year. "

Wei Shou's optimism and persistence brought him good luck again. After learning about the difficulties he encountered, the Beihai Youth Entrepreneurship Promotion Association under the Beihai Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League helped him apply for 50,000 yuan of interest-free youth entrepreneurship support funds, and Wei Shou's earthworm farming business was back on the right track.

In Wei Shou's view, starting a business has always been accompanied by risks and difficulties. For example, nowadays, with the overall decline of the domestic macro-economy, there are fewer exports, resulting in fewer cars from Guizhou to the coast. In the past, he sent a truckload of organic fertilizer to Guizhou for only 150 yuan per ton, but now the freight has risen to 300 yuan per ton. How to adapt to the external environment and reduce costs has become the problem that he thinks about most at present.

No matter how many difficulties he encounters, Wei Shou firmly believes that he can go on all the way. Because what motivates him to start a business is his interest in the industry, not whether it is the most profitable.

"now that young people come out to start their own businesses, 80% of their majors are not appropriate, which is normal." Wei Shou said that starting a business requires a person's follow-up learning ability to be particularly high. When he majored in philosophy at the university, he mastered the way to understand the world and deal with problems, which also benefited him for life.

Wei Shou firmly believes that earthworm farming is a potential industry in the future. Nanning alone can sort out hundreds of tons of organic waste every day, decompose and dispose of it. Earthworms can show their skills. Besides raising turtles and feeding fish, it can also dispose of kitchen garbage and then produce organic fertilizer, which can be directly used to produce green and healthy balcony flowers and balcony vegetables to form a virtuous ecological cycle.

"now few people pay attention to this field and think that it doesn't make money, but I want to try it slowly. what if it succeeds?" Wei Shou said.