From the center of Muong Long commune (Ky Son district) to Sa Lay village, where Cu Ba Co lives, is only about 2km, but in the rainy season the muddy road takes an hour to get there.

“Not only are the roads difficult to travel, but Muong Long also has a cold and foggy climate in winter. There are years when there is frost, so livestock in remote villages like Sa Lay and Xam Xum often die, especially chickens. There are years when it is so cold that chicks in Sa Lay and other villages die en masse, causing damage to the people,” said the Chairman of the Muong Long Farmers’ Association.

The same goes for Mr. Cu Ba Co's family. For many years, he has invested in raising black chickens, but every winter, many chickens die due to the cold. Not giving up in the face of the harsh weather, Mr. Co went online to learn and innovate farming methods to increase production efficiency. While reading articles on poultry farming techniques, he also learned about different farming methods than the free-range poultry farming that Muong Long people have always done, especially how to protect livestock from the cold.

Taking us on a tour of his family’s chicken farms, Mr. Cu Ba Co boasted of his success in applying the “3-phase” chicken farming technique. With this method, for the past 2 years, Mr. Co’s chickens have developed well, are healthy and grow quickly, providing a stable income and almost never die even in the cold winter when the temperature sometimes drops below 5 degrees Celsius.

In the 3 stages of raising chickens that Mr. Cu Ba Co applies, stage 1 is incubating eggs and brooding chicks from hatching until 1-2 months old. In the rather narrow space of the two main houses, he arranges an incubator and a row of brooding cages.

“In the past, Muong Long people mainly raised their own breeds by letting chickens incubate naturally. Therefore, the rate of dead chickens or spoiled eggs was quite high, especially in cold weather. After consulting the incubator model in Trung Tam village of the commune, I sold several batches of chickens and bought an incubator to create my own source of breeds. Then, based on the instructions, I searched online for how to use an incubator and how to incubate chicks. Therefore, the hatching rate is very high. After hatching, the chicks are incubated in airtight cardboard boxes with heating lamps and are protected from disease according to the correct process instructed by agricultural officials,” said Mr. Cu Ba Co.

After being kept in a heated, windproof and disease-prevented environment, stage 1 chickens will be transferred to a stage 2 area in a more spacious and airy space when they are about 1.5 months old.

The chicken raising location in phase 2 is an old house where his family used to live. At this stage, the chickens are 2-4 months old, weighing 700-800g, and are kept in a room with no air, electric lights and heating when the temperature drops. The chickens' food and water are mainly vegetables around the house and supplemented with corn and rice bran when it is cold to help the animals have resistance.

The third stage that Mr. Cu Ba Co applied was when the chickens were big enough and had good resistance, he moved them to a semi-free range area on the top of a hill near his house. On the high hill, he built a barn and zoned off the area to let the chickens roam free.

“In the morning, when the dew has cleared, the chickens will be released to graze and find natural food in the fenced area. At the end of the day, the chickens will return to the coop and be given supplementary food. On cold days, they will not be released,” said Mr. Co.

Thanks to the 3-stage chicken raising method, which is different from many households in Sa Lay, although he maintains a flock of over 300 chickens, around the time of Lunar New Year there are about 500 chickens, mainly chickens for meat, each year he has a steady income from selling eggs, breeding chickens and meat chickens of over 100 million VND.

From a poor household, thanks to his diligence in learning and finding ways to develop the economy, Cu Ba Co not only escaped poverty, but also became a fairly rich household.