Ningjin, China: A New Channel for Little Crickets to Become Farmers and Get Rich

DEZHOU, China, Sept. 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — This is a report from the Shandong Office of Hong Kong Business Daily. Last night, I caught a cricket and sold it for over 2000 yuan, “said Xu Jianxin, a villager from Ningjin County, Dezhou City, China, happily.” Catching a good cricket can support a one-year harvest of 30 acres of crops.

Xu Jianxin is a representative of the tens of thousands of cricket catchers in Ningjin County. Every year after the beginning of autumn, cricket enthusiasts from Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and other parts of the country flock to Ningjin County to choose, fight, and purchase crickets.

Ningjin County has unique climate, water quality, soil and other conditions that are suitable for the growth and reproduction of crickets. The crickets in Ningjin County have the characteristics of both northern and southern insects, which not only have the advantages of southern crickets being large, with large heads, large tops, large legs, and good skin color, but also have the strong fighting ability, endurance, and ferocity of insects in arid areas of the north. Therefore, Ningjin County is also known as the “First County of Chinese Crickets”.

Crickets have become a new channel for local farmers to increase their income, ranging from a few tens of yuan per cricket to five to six hundred yuan per cricket, or even thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan per cricket. Catching crickets has become a livelihood for the local people. In late summer and early autumn, many people from Ningjin who work outside will rush back to their hometown and drill into and out of the corn fields. The captured crickets will be sold in the trading market in the early morning.

In order to inherit and protect the cricket fighting culture in Ningjin, Ningjin County invested 3 million yuan to establish the Cricket Cultural Museum in 2010. It is the only cultural museum with a cricket theme in China and even the world. In June 2011, it was named the “World’s Largest Cricket Theme Exhibition Hall” by the Guinness World Headquarters in Shanghai. According to incomplete statistics, the daily trading volume of the cricket trading market in Ningjin County can reach 20000 people, with a daily trading volume of over 3 million yuan and an annual trading volume of around 300 million yuan.

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