Thanksgiving gives China’s turkey farmers a chance to gobble up some profits
- Western festivals drive a spike in sales for Chinese poultry breeders, despite protests against them on ideological grounds
- Domestic market remains small although interest in ‘exotic’ products is on the rise among the middle class
Chinese turkey farmer Fang Guoping does not get much sleep at this time of year. After finishing processing his orders for the day at 6pm, he has just enough time to freshen up, eat and get a few hours’ rest before starting the next round of slaughtering, cleaning and packing.
“I start work at 3 or 4am, and sometimes at midnight,” he said. “I only rest for a few hours a day. After all, this is the only time of the year that we can make money.”
The two-month period from November to New Year’s Eve is a window of opportunity for turkey farmers in China to cash in on two Western festivals – Thanksgiving and Christmas – as families and companies buy birds for their holiday banquets.
Since 2013, Fang has managed a rural cooperative of a dozen farmers in Hengfeng, a small county in east China’s Jiangxi province. Over the years, the group has generated millions of yuan in revenue, and now moves between 6,000 and 10,000 turkeys a year.
The farmers sell most of their birds online, via the e-commerce website Taobao, and Fang is one of the most successful turkey vendors on the platform.
The problem he and his fellow breeders face, however, is price, as local turkeys can be up to five times as expensive as imported birds.
Fang said that on Taobao, he sells a 1.5kg (3.3lb) turkey for 320 yuan (US$46), while a 5kg imported bird costs just 228 yuan.
