CATDOLL : CATDOLL: Why does the price of hairy crabs soar every year, but crab farmers still say they can’t make any money?

In Yangcheng Lake Town, crab shops of all sizes have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. As the reputation of Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs spreads, the price has also risen, with the market price rising by 5% to 10% each year.

Compared with all this noise, crab farmers have always been the quietest party. In the past few years when the price of hairy crabs has soared, the income of ordinary crab farmers has not increased. In the hairy crab industry chain, they are the link with the lowest income.

After 16 years of crab farming, the price of crabs has been rising year by year, and the price of crab seedlings has dropped 10 times, from 10 yuan per crab seedling 16 years ago to 1 yuan per crab seedling now. Despite this, crab farmers say that they cannot make any money. At the same time, crab dealers can earn millions a year.

Yangcheng Lake has only two seasons a year, the off-season and the peak season. The off-season is from January to mid-September. During this time, crab farmers don’t have much to do except feeding crabs every two days. The fishing villages around Yangcheng Lake are like an empty city during the day.

However, the tranquility will soon be broken. On September 22, the hairy crab fishing season will begin, and Yangcheng Lake will usher in the peak season. The diners will swarm in and fill all the farmhouse restaurants. A small hairy crab has brought about an entire hairy crab industry chain of eating, drinking and having fun. However, the crab farmers in Yangcheng Lake Town, the source of this industry chain, say that raising crabs is actually "not profitable."

Before 1996, fishermen in Yangcheng Lake had no concept of aquaculture. At that time, the entire lake was full of wild fish and fish fry released by the fishery administration. Yao Asan recalled that when the harvest season came, Quan Fengzao's family went out to catch fish and crabs. He said that apart from the fishing boat and fishing gear, there were no other initial costs. In those few years, his family accumulated tens of thousands of yuan in funds.

In 1996, the resources in the lake were running low, and the fishery administration stopped fishing and asked fishermen to engage in aquaculture. Yao Asan's family invested all the money they earned in the previous few years into aquaculture on the lake, paying a contract fee of 40,000 yuan at a time. From then on, Yao Asan really started to breed hairy crabs.

He clearly remembers that in 1996, when he first went to buy crab seedlings, they were still in short supply. A crab seedling the size of a baby's palm sold for 10 yuan. He bought more than 5,000 crab seedlings and spent another 60,000 to 70,000 yuan on building enclosures. That year, Yao Asan's family earned 40,000 to 50,000 yuan, which was a lot of the investment. He said that in the past 16 years, he only made money from crab farming twice, and that year's bumper harvest counted as one of them.

The next year, when Yao Asan went to buy crab seedlings, the price had dropped to 7 or 8 yuan each, but in the following year, the crab harvest was not very good and he could only make enough to live on. By the sixth year, the price of crab seedlings had dropped to 4 or 5 yuan. That year, Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs became famous, which was another time that Yao Asan made money after farming.

Because crab farmers have to sell to middlemen, who then sell it, so they can't make much money.

Crab farmers cannot make much money, it is the manufacturers who can make a lot of money.

The middlemen earn a lot of profits, and the restaurants process the products, and then other people make money.

No merchant will say that they can make a lot of money, of course crab farmers may be exploited by other merchants