By Xinhua writers Zhao Jiasong and Ren Yaoting
HOHHOT, July 22 (Xinhua) -- On a vast grassland in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, flocks of playful chickens dash about as they compete for tasty morsels hidden in the grass.
"I have been raising chickens on the grassland since 2009," said Huhetvg, a resident of Zhenglan Banner in Inner Mongolia.
Within just a decade, the chicken business has transformed fortunes in the prairie, bringing big bucks for Huhetvg, while also protecting the local ecosystem.
So far, more than 67 hectares of grassland have seen its quality improve.
Huhetvg started raising chickens because of his father Nasuvrtv. Locals there used to depend on raising cows and sheep to make a living. While the domesticated animals allowed locals to live good lives, over-grazing also damaged the ecosystem on the grassland.
Ten years ago, the area began to suffer from severe desertification, and the incomes of local herdsmen like Huhetvg's father began to tumble.
"I did not want to exacerbate the desertification, so I had to find new ways to maintain our incomes," said Nasuvrtv.
He came up with a novel idea: raising chickens on the prairie, an idea that his fellow herdsmen objected to strongly.
"How could you possibly raise chickens on the grassland? It's never going to work," locals warned the Nasuvrtv family.
But Nasuvrtv is not one to be dissuaded easily. He decided to give it a try.
The experiment turned out to be a complete failure.
The family raised 3,000 chickens in a chicken shed collectively. The chickens fed on food in the same area over and over again, which greatly damaged the grass and the ecosystem.
"We didn't have any experience, and suffered big losses," he said.
At the time, the Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences was conducting research about improving grassland quality by raising chickens. The research team and Nasuvrtv contacted each other and decided to cooperate.
Xu Hong, with the institute, conducted research on chicken coops, chicken types and chicken fodder.
Xu invented a unique, two-layered chicken coop, in which the upper layer is used for egg hatching and the lower layer for the chickens to rest.
"The coop is movable, so we can avoid the problem of raising the chickens in a fixed grassland area," Xu said. "The coop is easy to make and convenient to use."
Although the coop solved the problem of environmental impact, the sales of the chicken meat and eggs remained a hard nut to crack.
In 2014, Nasuvrtv's son Huhetvg took the chicken products and drove to Beijing with his nephew. There they scouted the capital city for potential buyers. Huhetvg eventually managed to find a client and sold the products, which consolidated his confidence.
These days, the chicken business is thriving on the prairie.
"Chickens are actually quite helpful for the grassland," said Xu Hong. "Their waste can enrich the soil, and they can spread grass seeds."
Xu said that the chickens also help eliminate locusts.
"Chicken-raising increases the vegetation coverage rate of the grasslands to 88.8 percent, 62.9 percent higher than that from raising cows and sheep," Xu said.
Zhu Jingxin, a local official, said that a coop of chickens can bring as much profit as a sheep.
These days, Huhetvg's chicken business has expanded to the Internet, with rich sales on the popular messaging app WeChat.
"I will not blindly expand the scale of my operation," he said. "The ecosystem on the grassland will always come first."
