The Frog Prince Who never gives up

In Sichuan province Mianzhu City aquaculture, he was praised as the "frog prince". He had experienced more than ten years of ups and downs, but he was always determined to earn millions of dollars by breeding wild frogs, to realize his dream of entrepreneurship.

Crack the cost problem, harvest the first success

When Liu Chunjun decided to farm frogs to realize his dream of starting a business in 1995, his wife was the first person to object.

It's not hard to understand. At that time, Liu Chunjun was already a skilled electrical maintenance worker. He had been working in this line of work since graduating from high school. Although there was no possibility of becoming rich overnight, a well-off life with sufficient food and clothing was enough.

But Mr. Liu has a mind of his own. When he learned at a dinner party that frogs have become a popular delicacy among high-consumption groups, with prices as high as 50 or 60 yuan per kilogram, he sensed the economic prospects of frog farming. On the one hand, frogs are strictly prohibited from being caught because they are good for the environment by eating pests. On the other hand, to satisfy their hunger, people go around looking for frogs to gorge on. The only way to resolve this contradiction is to develop artificial breeding of frogs. As long as people don't eliminate frogs from their beauty diet, there will be a market for farmed frogs. Liu Chunjun decided it was a worthwhile venture. Unable to persuade his wife, he quietly rented 5 mu of land near a reservoir one kilometer away from home, asked someone to dig up the pool, and then excitedly ran to a friend engaged in breeding home to consult the relevant technology.

Three days later, when he returned to his construction site, the whole field had been filled to the ground by the people his wife found. Liu Chunjun rebuilt by filling the breeding pond while moving out of his aunt to advise his wife.

During enter breeding stage, a lot of difficulties let Liu Chunjun did not expect, the primary solution is the bait problem. Frog eyes have a characteristic that they can only see "moving" things. Its retinal nerve cells are divided into five types, one type only responds to color, and the other four types only respond to a certain feature of the moving target. Therefore, it is a frog's instinct to eat live food. This posed a problem for Liu Chunjun, who had just tried to raise a frog. Although many insects are flying in the sky and crawling under the ground, in the wild it is the frogs themselves that forage for food. Now, with such a large number of breeding, where can we get so many live insects?

Liu Chunjun's first choice was the yellow mealworm, which has been widely used in the breeding industry. With his efforts, the yellow mealworm has been raised well, and the frogs also like this bait. But always feeding yellow powder insect cost is too high, because the yellow powder insect must raise with wheat bran, generally, three kilograms of wheat bran, and a kilo of green vegetables to produce one kilogram of yellow powder insect, which is breeding a kilogram of yellow powder insect must be at least 4 yuan of money, and a kilo of finished products are generally requires three kilograms yellow powder insect, thus get a kilo of finished product frog feed costs alone to 12 yuan. The mealworm eats like this, it's eating money. Two years passed and Liu lost 100,000 yuan. He realized he had to improve the bait or die.

But if you don't raise mealworms, what will the frogs eat? Liu spends his days trying to find a low-cost alternative.

One day, the weather is hot, the pressure is low, and a lot of flying insects gathered around the lights of the home, seeing this situation, Liu Chunjun has an idea. He hung energy-saving light bulbs on his frog pond, and the effect made him overjoyed -- in the night, a lamp seemed to become a signpost, flying insects rushed to fly over, frogs caught one, bait greatly saved.

But the light trap can only be carried out at night, and there is a seasonal, summer, flying insects less, and autumn and later, the frog or open mouth to eat, so how to solve? Liu Chunjun put his eyes on artificial insects again, this time he looked at earthworms and maggots. After consultation with the cattle rancher, the excrement of cows became the raw material for him to raise insects.

In contrast to mealworms, which need wheat bran, breeding earthworms and maggots cost little, since cattle manure from cattle farms is usually disposed of as waste, and Liu just spends some time manually pulling it back. And raise earthworm, raise fly maggot with excrement, do not have too MUCH technical requirement.

As a result, Liu's cost of raising frogs has dropped to 30 to 50 percent of what it used to be. He took advantage of the trend and aquaculture eel, a profit of more than 300,000 yuan.

The more the stronger, the dare to succeed first

One day in July 1999, a relentless rain washed out his farm, leaving him without a frog, not a single eel. Liu Chunjun has used the money he earned in previous years to expand the scale of his farm. This time, he has no money to restore the farm's production. A company learned that he was good at farming, so he was asked to be in charge of technical guidance and project management. After doing this for nearly 4 years, Liu Chunjun's entrepreneurial ambition has always remained the same. In June 2003, he left the company and started his second business with 6,000 yuan of savings. He rented an abandoned school and paid 3,600 yuan for two years, leaving him with 2,400 yuan.

To rely on this money to make a comeback is almost a myth, but Liu Chunjun has a progressive development strategy: from the low-cost low investment of earthworm, fly maggot breeding start with, with this accumulation of funds, such as a certain amount of funds, and then raise frog development. To save every penny for production, Liu Chunjun's life is very poor. During the Spring Festival in 2004, he ate vegetables and pickles for a month and a half while others were buying New Year goods and drinking wine, and eating meat.

With his tenacity and the money he had accumulated from breeding earthworms and maggots, he finally reinvested himself in the artificial breeding of frogs and soon recovered.

Liu continued his research to reduce the cost of raising frogs, focusing on solving the problem of the lack of live food in spring and autumn, and implementing a domestication experiment program, which changes the bait habits of frogs through domestication.

He experimented with the cheapest pigs as alternative bait. Cut the pig heart and lung into small pieces and place them on plastic film. See EAT USED TO LIVE FEED THE FROG UNMOVED, LIU CHUNJUN WITH A SMALL STICK GENTLY STIR, WHILE OBSERVING THE FROG'S REACTION, THE RESULT OF THE FROG IS EATEN, AND eat with RELISH. Liu ChunJUN FURTHER thinking: people breeding turtle, turtle, carp can be used compound feed, not only cost saving, and rich in nutrition, so can you make a frog special compound feed? He processed a compound pellet feed based on the combination of nutrients the frogs needed and experimented with feeding them.

He knew that if the pelleted feed was sprinkled directly on the feed table, the frogs would not eat it, because the feed would not move and the frogs would not be seen. He did this by placing a large number of maggots on the feeding table, followed by a small amount of feed, in response to the frogs' habit of eating live food. Because maggots can keep drilling and crawl on the feed table, the feed that looks like maggots can also be moved by the fly maggots. When the frog sees it, it will be eaten as live bait. Liu Chunjun gave this method a pleasant name: "to move with a quiet".

The results showed that when the frog started to eat the pellet feed, it felt unappetitive, and often spit out more than it ate. After a long time, it adapted a lot. As the frog slowly got used to pellet feed, Liu Chunjun struck while the iron was hot, little by little adjusting the ratio of live bait and pellet feed, constantly increasing the amount of pellet feed, to reduce live bait.

Having overcome the difficulty of frogs eating pellet feed, Liu took his idea a step further, starting with their "young" and turning to tadpoles.

Frogs are amphibians that "metamorphosis" begins when tadpoles are 60 days old, and once ashore they need live bait. Liu tries to keep them out of living bait and out of pellet feed at this stage so that their newly developed carnivorous characteristics are easier to domesticate. The experiment was effective and greatly reduced the cost.

Now, in addition to eating a certain amount of live bait every day, Liu Chunjun's frogs will also eat some proper nutrition with scientific pellet feed, the cost is greatly reduced, but the frogs grow fast and well.