In the prevention and control of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, we have ushered in a "year of the ox" and "the bull is soaring", I believe that in this year, we will get better. Speaking of cattle, here we introduce the "Dechang Buffalo" in Liangshan, Sichuan, which is a well-known buffalo breed.
China is a country rich in buffalo resources. Chinese buffalo can be divided into several groups: coastal buffalo, lake buffalo, highland buffalo and South China buffalo. Plateau buffalo, mainly distributed in the plateau Pingba area, has a short body, such as the Dechang buffalo in Liangshan, Sichuan, and the Dehong buffalo in Dehong, Yunnan.
The Dechang buffalo is one of the excellent local breeds in China, and the Dechang buffalo entry has long been included in the "Cihai".
Dechang buffalo is divided into three kinds of coat colors: black hair, yellow hair, and reed flower (black and white), and the black hair is superior, with a tall body, thick limbs, solid hooves, and strong tillage. Generally, adult cattle plow 1.5-2.5 acres of land on a daily basis, such as ploughing sand soil, it is more than three acres. Breeding bulls start breeding at the age of 2.5-3, 5-10 years old have the strongest breeding power, and after the age of 15, they are generally not used for breeding. Cows begin to be in heat at the age of 2, breed at the age of 3, and have their first child at the age of 4, usually two in three years, and there are also one litter a year. Cow breeds are 11-15 years old, and occasionally 20-year-old calves are born.
Although the Dechang buffalo is mainly produced in Dechang County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, it is also distributed in Xichang City, Mianning County, Huili County and Miyi County of Panzhihua City, and is suitable for altitude of 480-2520 meters.
Dechang buffalo has a long history of formation, according to the western Three Slopes of Xichang excavated in the Eastern Han Dynasty pottery buffalo view, has been a typical service buffalo "called thallium cattle" body shape, indicating that long before the Han Dynasty, the ancestors living in the Anning River Basin raised "Dechang buffalo". The Old Chronicle of the Dechang Buffalo "has a tall body, especially the strong." The county belongs to the Han people, and the general feeding is used as a substitute for farming."
The traditional feeding method is private herding, or driving the hillside, or releasing it on the riverbank, returning to the twilight, feeding with grass, and adding refined feeds such as glutinous rice porridge during the service period.
After liberation, the government attached great importance to the breeding and development of buffalo, and carried out many competitions, evaluations, rewards and other activities, and the cattle breeding industry developed for a time.
Photo by Dechang Buffalo Song Ming
After the people's commune in 1958, the cattle were returned to the community as means of production and fed by the production team. In dam areas with few cattle, many cultivated land, and no grazing land, more households are raised; in shallow mountainous areas with many cattle, large cultivated land areas, and grazing land, there are fixed personnel, grazing in groups during the day and in captivity at night; in mountainous areas with many cattle, wide grazing land, and small cultivated land areas, they are more extensive, generally for large groups of grazing and centralized breeding. From 1959 to 1977, the average annual growth rate was 181.3 heads, and the incremental rate was 1.6%, which was 2.4-3.4 percentage points lower than the normal annual increment rate. Coupled with the neglect of breeding and breeding, the Dechang buffalo breed shows a degrading trend, commonly known as the "dog head cattle" increased, and the quality dropped significantly.
In 1975, the Dechang County Party Committee and the county government issued a document requiring all districts and communes to strengthen the leadership of buffalo production, encourage private breeding of cattle and horses and other large livestock while vigorously grasping collective cattle raising, and abolish the prohibition of raising and selling cattle and the prohibition of slaughtering and cultivating cattle. August 15-21, 1978 in Chengguan opened the cattle market, came to buy cattle in Henan, Yunnan, Gansu and the province of Wenjiang, Mianyang, Nanchong, Neijiang and other places more than 100 merchants, seven days listed 205 cattle, traded 118, turnover of 61650 yuan, the highest price of 1100 yuan, the average price of 548 yuan. At the same time, the Badong, Kuanyu, Cida, Leyue, Jinchuan and Yonglang cattle trading markets are open on a regular and irregular basis. In that year, the county sold 817 buffaloes, which stimulated the enthusiasm of collectives and individual households to raise cattle.
Many elderly people still remember that the scene of the Dechang Race Bull Race was very warm, the bulls were crowded, the people were boiling, and a dam was full of buffalo, and the transaction volume was also considerable.
In 1977, the animal husbandry department established a buffalo breeding station in the Phoenix Brigade of Wuyi Commune. In 1979, breeding points were set up in Wangsuo, Liushou, Badong, Mali, Wuyi and other communes.
After the reform and opening up, the Dechang buffalo has shown another development opportunity. In 1983, it was expanded to Fangjia, Ayue, Kuanyu, Cida, Xiaogao, Leyue, Jinchuan, Xinglong and other Han district townships, forming a county and township buffalo breeding system with the state-run breeding station as the core and radiating to the township joint breeding points. From 1979 to 1990, a total of 13,793 breeding cows and 12,960 live calves were bred, including 991 artificially inseminated. The selected offspring cattle are physically robust and grow and develop rapidly.
In 1990, the number of buffalo in the county reached 24,050, an increase of 6 times compared with the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, an increase of 61.3% over 1979; from 1978 to 1990, the county sold a total of 9,107 buffaloes, worth more than 4.4 million yuan.
In recent years, due to the popularity of modern agricultural machinery, machine ploughing has gradually replaced buffalo farming, and the number of buffalo in Dechang has decreased rapidly. At the end of 2018, there were 1151 buffalo in Dechang County, of which 166 were bulls (only 15 were adult breeding bulls); 985 cows (970 breeding cows).
The government implemented the Dechang buffalo breeding measures, and the Dechang buffalo breed has a series of protection measures. Taking dechang County's 2019 provincial finance, the Dechang Buffalo Genetic Resources Conservation Project of The Modern Agricultural Development Engineering Baocheng as an example, its protected area has 154 bulls, including 12 adult breeding bulls; 925 cows, of which 910 can breed cows. The measures for the protection of buffalo include: consolidating 1 Dechang buffalo reserve, 11 breeding points, raising 11 bulls with independent bloodline excellent breeding bulls, 760 basic cows, and planting 350 acres of pasture; carrying out the purification and rejuvenation of Dechang buffalo, measuring the body size of all Dechang buffalo in the reserve, establishing individual files, breeding archives, breeding archives, and genealogy files of breeding bulls and breeding cows; adopting a 3-year rotational breeding bull matching method to control the increment of the inbreeding coefficient of each generation within 0.1.
(China Daily Sichuan Reporter Station)
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