Early the next morning, Meng Lang followed Lao Meng to a pig farm on the west side of the village.
After entering the iron gate, I saw a little old man holding a cigarette, wearing a blue coat and black rain boots, carrying a bucket of feed, as if he was preparing to feed the pigs.
"Uncle Gen!"
"Hey! It's Xiaolang. It's rare to come here today."
The little old man showed a deeply wrinkled smile.
Although Uncle Gen is much older than Lao Meng, he is of the same generation as Lao Meng and can be considered a relative within the fifth server. It is not an exaggeration to say that he watched Meng Lang and the others grow up.
"Well! I'm not going home now. My dad and I came over to hang out. I heard that you two had a fight again?" Meng Lang didn't shy away and asked directly with a smile.
"Hi! It's not just that. Seeing that the pork market has been bad recently, we have decided to raise fewer pigs this year and repair the factory.
Your dad objected, saying that the market conditions are sunny three days and rainy two, and the market will come back when the next batch of piglets are fat. He also said that expanding the scale of breeding can reduce costs. Anyway, everyone has his own say."
Well! The situation is clear at a glance, a conservative conservative and a radical young man.
"Well, I think what you said makes sense."
"You just know how to be nice." Uncle Gen laughed and cursed.
"Is the price of pork very low recently?" Meng Lang asked again.
I went shopping with Xiaoyu before, and the price of pork in the market did seem to have dropped a lot.
"Yes! The current price of live pigs is only 5 yuan per pound. If the price does not go up, I am afraid there will be a northwest wind this year!" Uncle Gen shook his head and sighed.
"It's normal for prices to fluctuate. It can't always be this low. The country will definitely not let everyone trade at a loss, right?"
At this time, Lao Meng also changed into a set of work clothes and came out and put forward his own arguments.
Well! In short, you have to believe in the party.
"Then we have to wait until the policy comes out. I can't eat hot tofu in a hurry!"
"When the policy comes out, the day lily will be cold."
Meng Lang followed the two of them and wandered around the place, listening to the two bickering with a smile, and occasionally giving them a slap.
The environment in a pig farm is naturally not very pleasant, and the indescribable smell of ammonia can probably scare away 99% of young people.
This pig farm occupies a small area, about more than 300 square meters, and houses more than 100 sows and seven or eight boars in total.
Including Lao Meng, the nominal "general manager", there are seven workers. It is a typical rural self-breeding and self-supporting model, which means that piglets are not purchased from outside and rely on natural breeding to be self-sufficient.
The annual slaughter volume is about a thousand pigs. As for the profit earned, it is highly related to the current pig price and feed price.
When the market is good, each pig can make hundreds of profits, and when the market is bad, you may even lose money.
There are currently five shareholders in the pig farm. In the past few years, Lao Meng's 30% of the shares could be divided into over 100,000 yuan each year. This is already a considerable amount of income in rural areas.
In 2016, the price of live pigs soared, and everyone made a lot of money from this pig farm. As soon as Meng Lang graduated that year, Lao Meng had the idea of letting him come back and inherit his father's business.
As a result, everyone knew that Meng Lang shivered and was so frightened that he walked thousands of miles alone...
Although there was a talented person from Yanjing University who successfully counterattacked by selling pork, then the Wuhan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd. next door diversified and entered the pig industry.
But if you go home and engage in new agriculture, open an online store, or even do live broadcasts, it’s better than raising pigs, right?
Like many young people, Meng Lang, who had just graduated and had not yet been severely beaten by society, was unwilling to settle down in the countryside as a professional pig farmer.
In the past two years, Lao Meng's attitude has softened and he has begun to change his tune. He hopes that Meng Lang can find a job in a nearby town, take the civil service examination or become a Chinese teacher.
Mainly because the market has been sluggish in the past two years, the profits of pig farms have naturally plummeted.
This greatly affected Lao Meng's ambition to make the pig farm bigger and stronger, and even turn it into a family business.
In fact, the price of live pigs has not been rising in the past two years. In addition to more and more imported pork entering the country to earn profits, another major factor is the surge in the supply of live pigs.
Although a lot of pig production capacity has been eliminated due to environmental protection in the past two years, whether it is the expansion of production capacity by small and medium-sized rural pig farms or the elimination of some production capacity due to environmental protection, the impact on the supply of pigs will not be significant.
It is the large agricultural and animal husbandry groups that really have a substantial impact on the supply and demand of the live pig market.
According to statistics, in the first quarter of 2018, the supply of pigs to domestic listed agricultural and animal husbandry companies surged by 135%!
The scale of these large agricultural and animal husbandry groups is not small in itself, but their pig production and supply are continuing to increase dramatically, coupled with the cost advantages of large-scale breeding.
Their increase in the number of pigs raised and slaughtered has squeezed out the living space of small and medium-sized rural pig farms.
According to predictions, the pig supply of large-scale pig farming groups will increase by at least 20% this year, while the slaughter volume of small rural pig farms will plummet by at least 15%.
It is precisely because of the continuous surge in the supply of live pigs that the relationship between supply and demand is out of balance.
The price of pigs started to fall in 2017, and in 2018, the price of pigs plummeted!
When transitioning from an agricultural country to an industrialized country, "sheep cannibalize people" will always be an unavoidable problem.
Industrialization will naturally increase production efficiency, so the more highly industrialized it is, the fewer people employed in agriculture and animal husbandry will be needed, which will lead to large-scale farmer bankruptcy.
We must know that there are still 40% of the rural population in the country. Once these people go bankrupt and there are not enough jobs in cities and towns, it will be a huge social hazard.
Therefore, in many cases, it is not that China is incapable of large-scale planting and breeding like developed countries abroad. When a button is pressed, the machine starts rumbling, and all that is left is to read the newspaper and drink coffee.
Rather, doing so would be a devastating blow to the small farmer economy.
Therefore, everything must have a transition. Managing a big country is like cooking a small dish. If you take too big a step, it will easily lead to oversteps.
But this is only a temporary compromise of the times. As long as society is still progressing, the trend of large-scale production will be irreversible.
Standing on a high hill, overlooking the factory buildings below and the surrounding rolling hills, Meng Lang was writing and drawing in the notebook he carried with him.
"Let me ask, what are you doing here today?" Lao Meng's voice came from behind.
Meng Lang turned around to look, and at some point, Lao Meng followed him.
Lao Meng glanced at the notebook in his hand, "Those who know think you are my son, and those who don't know think you are the leader who came to inspect."
"Oh, it's nothing. I was just thinking that this pig farm is prospering under your wise leadership, but the pollution problem is a bit serious."
"Nonsense, which pig farm can avoid polluting the environment?" Lao Meng rolled his eyes.
"Yeah! So for the sake of the future of our Mengjia Village's green mountains and green waters, I'm going to get you an investment to transform this place into an ecological pig farm!"
Meng Lang made a stroke with his hand.
“This is a pig farm, and several biogas tanks and manure treatment areas can be built over there. An artificial lake can be dug in the downstream water source to raise fish, and several fruit and vegetable greenhouses can be built next to it. A free-range farm can be built on that hilltop to raise fish.
Some rich recipes like chicken and duck…”
"Stop, stop, stop!" Lao Meng interrupted him speechlessly. "Investment? Where are you going to attract investment?"
"You think I don't know what an ecological breeding farm looks like? The question is, do you know how much it costs? Are you out of your mind when you ask me to set up a small pig farm to engage in ecological breeding?"
"Hmm..." Meng Lang thought for a moment and asked, "I remember Dad, you hold 30% of the shares, right? How much money did you invest in this factory in total before?"
"About 150,000, what's wrong?"
"One hundred and fifty thousand... Then I will give you two plans. One is to acquire their shares at twice the original investment amount and convert them into employment contract employees.
The second is to wait for the investment to come in and dilute their shares in equal proportions. Dad, what do you think?"
"Can you really attract investment?"
Seeing Meng Lang's serious discussion, Lao Meng was a little unsure whether this guy was joking or not.
"Can I still lie to you? In your impression, I like to brag? It's because our company just wants to enter the breeding industry."
Lao Meng thought about it and thought that maybe the boss of Meng Lang Company was really rich, so he hesitated and asked, "How much investment can you get?"
"The first phase of investment... is probably 10 million." Meng Lang thought for a while.
Lao Meng's eyes widened, 10 million? Still the first installment?!
The total investment in this pig farm is only 150,000 yuan. You can give me a total capital increase of 10 million yuan.
Is this a question of diluting shares? Is this a question of simply flushing it away?
"No, what on earth does your company boss want to do?"
What do you want to do?
Meng Lang sighed slightly.
What else can we do? See if we can build a doomsday survival base...