Landless farmers had no capital to raise chickens, so Wens gave them everything they needed on credit and bet on getting paid back only after the birds were sold.

问题

a would-be small producer has the labor and land but none of the capital, inputs, or market access a business needs to start

背景

换别人会怎么做

The standard lending fix was a bank loan or a supplier requiring cash upfront for chicks, feed and medicine, exactly the arrangement capital-poor farmers with no collateral and no credit history couldn't get, leaving them locked out of commercial production despite having the land and labor to do the work.

他们看到了什么

Wens saw that the farmers' actual problem wasn't a lack of ability or effort, it was a lack of capital and market access at the exact moments a farming cycle required them, upfront for inputs, and at sale for a guaranteed buyer. Rather than requiring cash first like a bank or ordinary supplier would, the cooperative extended chicks, feed, medicine and guidance entirely on credit and guaranteed a fixed buyback price above market, absorbing the timing and price risk itself so farmers only had to supply the labor and land they already had.

那一手

The company built what became known nationally as the 'company plus farmer' (公司+农户) model: it supplied day-old chicks, later piglets, feed, medicine and technical guidance to contracted farmers entirely on credit, and guaranteed to buy back the finished animals at a fixed price, slightly above market, regardless of what the market did in between — the company, not the farmer, absorbed the price risk. By 1987 the model had grown to 36 contracted farming households. In 1989, when poultry demand went soft, the company honored its guaranteed buyback prices anyway, taking a loss to keep every farmer's income intact rather than renegotiate the deal it had promised.

为什么管用

Supplying inputs on credit and guaranteeing a fixed above-market buyback price meant farmers with no collateral could still start commercial production, since the company, not a bank, was extending the trust and absorbing the risk that farmers couldn't otherwise get anyone to take on. The arrangement only became credible, not just theoretically generous, when Wens honored its guaranteed buyback prices at a real loss during the 1989 downturn rather than renegotiating, a costly signal that proved the promise held even when honoring it hurt the company, which is exactly what made farmers start treating a Wens contract as more reliable than the open market itself. Because that credibility compounded, word spreading and driving rapid growth in contracted households, the company could scale the model to more than 50,000 partner households by the mid-2010s, turning an initial willingness to absorb short-term losses into the trust infrastructure underlying a business that became the world's second-largest hog producer by volume.

值了多少

Word of the 1989 episode spread and farmers began treating a Wens contract as more reliable than the open market itself, driving rapid growth in contracted households over the following years. Economist Zhou Qiren, studying the model decades later, documented a comparable later episode in which Wens absorbed billions of yuan in poultry-side losses during a single downturn year, cross-subsidized from profits elsewhere in the business, specifically to keep buyback promises to farmers intact. By the mid-2010s the model had expanded nationwide to more than 50,000 partner households; the company's 2015 IPO reportedly created dozens of billionaires and over a thousand millionaires among its roughly 6,000 direct employees through employee shareholding, and Wens became Asia's largest and the world's second-largest hog producer by volume.

什么时候会失灵

The mechanism depends on the company genuinely having enough financial reserves or cross-subsidy capacity to honor buyback guarantees during a real downturn, since Zhou Qiren's research documented Wens absorbing billions of yuan in losses in a single bad year, a scale of commitment a thinner-margin or less diversified company couldn't sustain without the guarantee itself becoming worthless the first time it was truly tested. It also depends on the company maintaining genuine technical and veterinary oversight over contracted farmers' production, since guaranteeing a fixed price on credit-financed inputs only works if the company can reasonably ensure the animals it's committed to buying will actually reach sellable quality. And the model concentrates real risk in one counterparty: a farmer's entire livelihood becomes dependent on that one company's continued solvency and good faith, meaning the arrangement that freed farmers from needing their own capital also removed the diversification a farmer selling into an open market with multiple buyers would otherwise have.

后来呢

The 'company plus farmer' model is widely studied in Chinese agricultural economics as a template for integrating capital-poor smallholders into modern supply chains without displacing them into wage labor, and Wens' willingness to absorb losses to protect farmer income during downturns is cited as the specific mechanism that made tens of thousands of independent households trust the arrangement enough to keep re-upping for decades.

资料来源

1. [1]周其仁：中国的温氏公司还是太少了北京大学国家发展研究院 (Peking University National School of Development), 2018bimba.pku.edu.cn
2. [2]温氏股份如何走上巅峰，又如何跌下神坛？澎湃新闻 (The Paper), 2022thepaper.cn

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