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From Gymnastics to Raising Beef Cattle |
At first sight, Shen is just an ordinary housewife, especially when seen feeding her dozens of beef cattle and "massaging" their backs with a broom.
However, rarely should books be judged by their cover, and Shen is no exception to sage truth of the old adage: The young woman once held a great passion for gymnastics, having begun learning and practicing by herself when she attended primary school, around the time of fifth grade.
With her growing interest in gymnastics, Shen wrote an application letter to the Putian Sports School of Putian, a city in southeast China's Fujian Province, when she was in her second year of junior high school. Valued for her sincerity, Shen was eventually accepted into the school.
Three years later, in light of her outstanding performance, Shen went on to become a gym coach at the very school after her graduation therefrom.
The next year, Shen won an opportunity to further her gymnastics studies at a sports school in south China's Guangdong Province, which is famous for fostering national athletes. However, due to the difficult financial situation of her family, Shen was forced to pass up the opportunity.
"After I gave birth to my child, I stayed at home and didn't go to work for quite some time. At that time, I didn't feel like working for others, and so I came up with the idea of starting my own business, since I was still young," recalled Shen.
Shen said she chose to become a cow farmer under the influence of a female university graduate by the name of Chen Yilin, who was raising beef cattle of her own at the time.
It was then that Shen consulted Chen about raising beef cattle and began looking up materials on the Internet.
In the meantime, she found that her hometown, Fujian Province's city of Zhangzhou, had a potentially lucrative market for local beef, given that more than 80 percent of the area's beef was being imported from distant regions.
Consequently, in 2012, Shen asked her husband to build a cowshed. That May, with the borrowed money, the couple purchased 15 calves, kicking off their new life as cattle farmers.
Shortly afterwards, Shen found that her calves had diarrhea and were passing blood in their stool. The veterinarian she went to see prescribed some medicine but didn't give any of the calves an injection.
In desperation, Shen turned to the Internet for online help and resources, and ended up taking it upon herself to treat her cattle with self-prepared medicinal injections.
Later, Shen would discover that injecting her cattle with Western medicine not only produced side effects for the animals but was also an irresponsible act to those who ate her beef.
Through communicating with other cattle farmers, she learned that feeding them straws could help nourish their intestines and stomach. Accordingly, she acquired the additional daily task of gathering straw from the fields.
"When I was a small girl, I had no idea what the fields were like, but now I have to cut straw by myself. In the very beginning, I couldn't take the heavy manual work," said Shen, who sighed with emotion while recalling her past experience.
However, the tenacity that Shen developed through practicing gymnastics eventually helped her overcome the physical obstacles and hardships that stood in her way.
During the course of her entrepreneurship, Shen has encountered various setbacks; but the tough young woman has accumulated a wealth of experience in raising beef cattle and has expanded her breeding scale from 15 heads to more than 60.
As people nowadays pay much attention to food safety, Shen feeds her beef cattle only straw, corn cobs, papaya peel, potatoes and other natural food products, which not only ensure that the cattle yield more meat but also guarantee the nutritious quality of the beef.
"As a former gymnast, I also hope my cattle can become a 'dream team' to enable people to eat healthy beef and ensure safety on the tip of their tongues," said Shen.
Source: Women of Chine
