The development of cattle industry is in trouble: it takes a long time to get back to capital and has a high threshold for entry.

A person in the industry said with a laugh that the cattle industry can be described as "father does not hurt, mother does not love".

Last year, the number of beef cattle in the province in 2011 was only 1.26 million, and there were few "ten thousand cattle farms".

It is difficult to make money by raising cows. Calves are very expensive.

Sai Deyin, chairman of Zhongxiang Saiyu Animal Husbandry Development Co., Ltd., has been "dealing with cattle" since childhood. Ten years ago, Saide Bank began to realize that the entire cattle industry cow is gradually declining, in the future must be scarce resources, pre-emptive entry, perhaps unlimited business opportunities.

In 2002, Saide Bank rented a piece of land in Zhongxiang City and bought 1000 cows. According to the idea at that time, he planned to gradually develop into a "ten thousand cattle farm" within a few years, making it the largest cow farm in the province. However, over the past 10 years, Saide Bank has not only failed to realize its dream, but even confiscated it. He told this reporter in frustration that it has been quite difficult to do this decade, and now it is ready to withdraw.

Of all the problems, the first thing is that it is difficult to make money by raising cows. Saide Bank calculated an account for the reporter and bought a 2-year-old cow at this year's price at a price of 8000-10000 yuan. Cows are singleton breeding animals, which, to put it simply, can only give birth to one child at a time, and it takes 285 days from successful mating to calves.

This is not all, calves can not be sold immediately after they are born. "it takes one to a year and a half to raise more than 200 kilograms before it can be sold as shelf cattle to fattening plants downstream." The market is good this year. A 200kg calf can be sold for 6000 yuan, and it takes four years to breed two shelf cattle to recover 12000 yuan. "not counting the cost of fodder and labor for cows and calves, if you add it all, you will only get back to the cost for four years."

The number of beef cattle in the country has been reduced by 10 million in 4 years.

It is not just calves that are in short supply. Xu Shangzhong, head of the cattle branch of the National Animal Husbandry Association, said in an interview with the media that the country's beef production has dropped from more than 7 million tons in 2010 to more than 6 million tons, and the number of beef cattle in stock has dropped by more than 10 million heads in the past four years. Guo, director of the provincial animal husbandry and veterinary bureau, admitted that the stock of beef cattle in our province has also declined by 3% and 5% in the past two years.

Data from Hubei Provincial Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau show that there are more than 3 million beef cattle and 1.26 million beef cattle in our province in 2011.

Zhang Zhaoxin, director of the Industry and Technology Research Office of the Rural Economic Research Center of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that the slow expansion of beef cattle industry groups is determined by the slow breeding of cattle.

Earlier, beef was cheap because most of the beef eaten by citizens was cattle raised in rural areas. "when farmers raise cattle and cultivated land, they are slaughtered and sold at a certain age, and the labor and feed costs are not calculated."

Nowadays, cattle farmers are usually old people who stay at home. In addition, with the continuous improvement of the degree of mechanization in rural areas, the cultivated land mission of cattle has been replaced, which has led to its massive elimination.

Lu Guojian, a native of Henan who has been in the beef cattle business in Wuhan for more than a decade, collects cattle in Hunan, Guizhou and other places all the year round. He sighs that three years ago, he found that the source of cattle was "exhausted." if it goes on like this, five years later, scalpers will become a 'national treasure'.

The commercial scale breeding of beef cattle is backward.

Monitoring by the Provincial Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau shows that fattening a beef cow can make a profit of about 2000 yuan, an increase of more than 80% over the same period last year. However, many farmers do not think this is an easy business.

On the one hand, the cost of raising cows is too long, on the other hand, the high threshold for entry has deterred many farmers. Wang Zhenyang, a farmer in Xinzhou, has a stock of about 500head of beef cattle in his farm. According to him, the various costs of a cow are as high as 12000 yuan. It includes the purchase cost of 6000 yuan for shelf cattle, 3500 yuan for feed, 500 yuan for labor, 1200 yuan for loan interest, and so on. "leaving aside the cost of leasing land and building a factory, it takes more than 5 million yuan to start." In this way, when a cow is bought as a calf and goes out of the fence, excluding the cost, it will earn about 2000 yuan.

In such a high demand for funds, farmers are generally faced with the problem of difficult loans. "Livestock cannot be used as a mortgage for real estate, the land is leased, and it is difficult for enterprises to finance loans." Saide Silver said.

Chen Hongsong, deputy director of the Hubei Provincial Bureau of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine, once said publicly that large-scale farming in the cattle industry lags several years behind that of poultry.

It is reported that in 2013, our province will further support specialized breeding farms and strive to increase the basic female livestock stock by 10%. However, an industry insider predicts that the contradiction between supply and demand of beef cattle will be difficult to alleviate within 3-5 years.