Cash cows

By Wang Ru (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-13 14:20

For Tobgye, 50, income from dairy farming has gone up dramatically.

Chicken farmer Yeshe Drolka, 34, is rather shy when approached by strangers. But that does not distract her from making sure each of her visitors wipes his shoes on the small disinfectant mat before stepping into her farm.

This native of Tsethang town in Nedong, knows that an attack of the deadly bird flu can kill all the birds on her 20-hectare chicken farm. That means a total wipe out of around 1 million yuan ($146,000) - the amount she made from selling more than 200,000 chickens last year.

Nedong county in Lhoka prefecture, which sits 3,000 m above sea level, is no stranger to agriculture. Frescos inside Yumbulagang - its oldest building - show that farming first appeared in Lhoka more than 2,000 years ago.

Yumbulagang was built by King Nyatri Tsenpo 2,100 years ago and became the summer palace of Songtsen Gampo and his wife Princess Wencheng. It was converted into a Buddhism monastery in later centuries.

Cash cows

Recalling her long road to success as a chicken farmer, Yeshe, who studied up to middle school, says: "It was expensive to buy chicken, since nobody raised chicken in my town and relied on supplies from Lhasa.

"I just had a gut feeling that raising chickens could make for a good business, but had neither the money nor the knowledge to get started."

Yeshe married a retired soldier in Lhoka in 2001 and moved to Hubei, her husband's hometown. There, the couple worked in a big chicken farm and that is where she first learned how to raise chickens.

In 2003, the couple returned to Lhoka to start their own chicken farms. It was a difficult start as Yeshe had to borrow 30,000 yuan ($4,400) from relatives and friends.

During the freezing winters, she would huddle up in a shabby shack in the woods near her farm, which she and her husband built with their bare hands. She had only 500 chickens at first and soon lost many to disease.

"There was no water and no electricity. I often cried but never thought of giving up," Yeshe says.

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