Livestock production systems including cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, and related animals.
Deep in the Taihang Mountains, Leyi Village, Heshun County, Shanxi, the “leopard-eating-cattle” conflict is not pronounced. Local beef cattle farming has contracted sharply during the recent price trough — only three households still keep cattle, just over seventy head, down from a peak of over two hundred.
Following a Urumqi screening of the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture, livestock experts, university students, community builders and retired forestry and grassland officials shared their views on pasture degradation, pastoralist income and food systems.
Tulan and her family, herders in Harigaobi gacha, East Ujimqin Banner, Inner Mongolia, remain committed to raising traditional Ujimqin sheep through seasonal nomadic herding. With just clear water and salt, the clean fragrance of the grassland rises from the pot.
Wu Longlong from Mutongxin Farm personally shares his method for Fragrant Steamed Pork Belly. From the second to the seventh day of the New Year, Foodthink, together with farmers from the Beijing Organic Farmers Market, presents a New Year Recipe Collection – one dish each day.
Grassland contraction means Kazakh herders’ cattle and sheep can no longer rely on haymaking in hayfields alone to get through winter; watering, harvesting, planting and market purchases all push up winter costs.
Field research by Feng Xiaojun’s team at China Agricultural University in a major dairy-cattle county in Shandong finds family dairy farms outperform large-scale dairy farms in farmer income, import resilience, environmental protection, and cow welfare; seven policy recommendations cover funding reform, small dairy farmer organisations, and farmer-run processing.
Smallholder farms were not the main cause of the 2008 melamine incident, and large farms hold no advantage in feed management, cattle disease prevention, or processing transparency. The roughly 0.2 g protein gap per 100 g is negligible for Chinese residents whose protein intake is already adequate.
Wang Sheng, 200,000 yuan in debt, secretly grazes in a Qinghai Lake no-grazing zone, borrowing new loans to repay old ones for seven or eight years; Tenzin Zongzhi left the pasture to deliver food but plans to herd again within months.
Several young directors at the World Nomadic Film Festival in Jiagedaqi, deep in the Greater Khingan Range, film the shocks facing pastoral areas: imported meat driving prices down, fenced pastures replacing the life of following water and grass, and grandchildren who can no longer speak their elders’ Mongolian.
In a small town in eastern Sichuan, at a modern slaughterhouse park invested in by the author’s aunt, cattle and sheep orders, retail cuts and pre-dawn deliveries make up daily life; customer complaints and workshop smells expose how industrialised slaughter is hidden from everyday life.
