Innovative Practice from DEKON AGR (02419) on Teaching Farmers to Raise Sows, Balancing Profitability and Livelihoods.

In the past, I used to think that only by working could I see the world, but now I realize that staying rooted in my hometown can also make a name for myself. In 2017, when "Zhang Gong" had just returned from a construction site, he was not experienced in pig farming. Now, he is an entrepreneur who manages a pig farm in Hechuan, Chongqing, with an annual output of over 3000 pigs. He is a model figure in the DEKON AGR (02419) cooperation list. He recalls that the most difficult part was that the meat-to-feed ratio of each batch of pigs was very high, and the quality rate was not even up to 95%. After receiving technical and management empowerment from DEKON, his farm underwent a dramatic change. Production data from 2024 showed that the feed-to-meat ratio of the 142kg marketable pigs raised on his farm had decreased to 2.39, with a quality rate of 99.13%. From "Zhang Gong" to the skilled pig farmer "Farmer Zhang", the pivotal role played by DEKON AGR is crucial. As the first company in the industry to help farmers raise sows through technical empowerment, since its establishment, DEKON AGR has always regarded "connecting farmers and achieving chain collaboration development" as a key focus of the company's work. Over ten years ago, the chairman of DEKON AGR, Wang Degen, realized that "being able to raise sows" was an important competitive advantage for pig farmers, especially after he went abroad to study and learn from the advanced pig farming industry in Europe, Wang Degen became even more determined about this. However, the traditional self-breeding model and the "company + farmers" piglet foster model have always been the mainstream in the market. Initially, even within the company, Wang Degen faced resistance when trying to promote the new model of "secondary family farm" where sows are handed over to farmers and taught how to raise them well. It was even more difficult to make farmers truly accept DEKON's innovative practices. Based on the core value of "not easy, not done", over the past decade, DEKON AGR has successfully carved out a development path with its own characteristics. In Wang Degen's view, the key to making pig farmers "be able to raise sows" is to cultivate a high-quality group of farmers. To achieve this, DEKON specifically set up a Farm Service Department to continuously provide farmers with a "full set of methods for raising sows" through a high-quality professional team. Li, a master's degree graduate in animal medicine, who works as a specialist in the service department of the DEKON Hechuan Regional Company, has a solid theoretical foundation due to his research in the laboratory during his master's degree. The practical experience and further studies at DEKON have transformed him into an excellent farm guardian. From feed formulation to temperature control, from observing pig behavior to equipment maintenance, under Li's meticulous management, in 2024, the farms under his jurisdiction had no abnormalities throughout the year, and the average quality rate of the pigs on the market exceeded 96%. The Farm Service Department where Li works is a key department for DEKON AGR to reach and serve family farm owners. After years of exploration and precipitation, DEKON AGR has established a complete set of scientific and standardized management models for family farms and can provide long-term support covering the entire lifecycle for cooperated family farms. Before formal cooperation, DEKON will conduct necessary screening based on the farm owner's own conditions. Once the intention to cooperate is established, DEKON will provide the farm owner with family farm building, livestock technology training, and corporate culture training. Only after meeting the requirements can production begin. During the cooperation period, DEKON will also provide comprehensive technical guidance and support to the farm owner, and dispatch production management specialists to regularly supervise and guide the farm owners. With the full technical support and empowerment of DEKON, many farmers without previous pig farming experience like Mr. Zhang have now grown into skilled pig farmers. This capability has made DEKON become a "platform + ecological" service-oriented enterprise: its empowerment scope not only covers beginners who start from scratch but also deeply serves existing pig farmers with farming experience. For the latter, DEKON systematically improves their farming efficiency and production performance by providing high-quality sow resources, refined data management, and professional technical services. This path is essentially a light-asset production capacity integration modelDEKON does not directly increase production capacity on a large scale but rather modernizes the existing production capacity of traditional farmers through technology and management outputs, transforming relatively backward productivity into advanced productivity, thereby opening up new growth space in the industry structure upgrade. From the actual results, the acceptance of the DEKON AGR secondary family farm model by farm owners is steadily increasing, because this model can effectively help farmers establish a more resilient profit-generating ability. DEKON continuously optimizes the production efficiency of cooperative farmers through systematic technical and management empowermentPSY (number of weaned piglets produced per sow per year) has increased to 27 in the first half of this year, coupled with better feed conversion rates and disease control systems, achieving significant efficiency improvement and cost reduction. These measures not only enable farm owners to fully share industry dividends during market upturns but also enhance their operational resilience with a lower cost baseline during industry fluctuations, thus obtaining more sustainable and stable returns. GMTEight believes that the validated DEKON AGR secondary family farm model is a win-win situation for all parties involved. For the company itself, the light-asset, highly binding, and efficient characteristics of this model are conducive to DEKON to navigate through cycles and maximize its growth potential in the future. For farmers, DEKON's "teaching to fish" approach of educating them on sow farming provides a good starting point for migrant workers to return to entrepreneurship in their hometowns and for university students to start businesses in rural areas. Furthermore, DEKON's innovative "connecting farms and farmers" model is expected to contribute positively to solving rural issues in the country and achieving common prosperity as early as possible.