Goose feathers help spread the wings of industry in SW China’s Guizhou

Photo shows a goose breeding base in Jinping county, southwest China's Guizhou province. (Photo/Chinanews.com)

Jinping county in southwest China’s Guizhou province has a long tradition of goose breeding. However, due to various reasons, goose breeding had failed to emerge as an industry. In 2017, things started to change after the local government invited Reinforced Shuttlecocks Ltd, or RSL, the world’s largest shuttlecock manufacturer, to open a production base there.

Yang Haixiang has been a witness to the changes. The woman, who works at a goose breeding base that supplies raw materials to the shuttlecock factory, said that in the past the geese were mainly served up as fare on the dinner table, but nowadays, they have become cash cows for their feathers and have to be taken very good care of.

Every day, the breeding base sends 150,000 geese to the shuttlecock factory, which is 20 kilometers away. Hu Bing, head of the production base, said that an average of 14 feathers from one goose would be selected and plucked, with the combined feathers from the 150,000 geese amounting to about 3,000 kilograms in weight, which can then be used to produce 120,000 shuttlecocks after passing through 38 manufacturing processes. Hu added that the production base represents 40 percent of RSL’s total production capacity, and globally, one out of every 10 shuttlecocks bought and sold come from Jinping.

The geese are then processed and made full use of after their specially-selected feathers were collected. Last year, about 3 million geese in all contributed their feathers as inputs for shuttlecock manufacturing, with the remainder of their bodies being used to produce meat, oil, and clothing products, according to Tan Yuanwen, director of Jinping’s agriculture and rural affairs bureau.

Over the past four years, an industrial chain incorporating goose breeding, shuttlecock manufacturing, and sports and leisure tourism has been established in Jinping. Being able to generate 1 billion yuan in combined revenues annually, the industrial chain has provided jobs for 674 villagers, while increasing the incomes of 13,000 impoverished households.