National Geographic

FEEDING CHINA 91WALKING THE LENGTH OF A COW BARN andprocessing plant at Modern Farming’s Beng-bu Farm in Anhui Province, the largest dairyfarm in China, took me almost five minutes. Itwas dim and cool, and there was a sweet smell,half animal and half decay, that wasn’t quiteunpleasant. The cows, black-and-white mottledHolsteins, were quiet. They poked their headsthrough slotted metal fencing to reach feed alongthe concrete walkway and eyed me, a white-cladinterloper in sterile coveralls, galoshes, bonnet,and face mask, with mild interest. The farm,nearly 600 acres, has eight enormous barns builtto hold 2,880 milking cows each. Other barns andsheds hold calves and pregnant cows, putting thefarm’s maximum bovine population at 40,000,among the largest in the world. Part of industri-al agriculture’s allure is the sheer scale of it, andChina has succumbed to this as it has expandedits meat and dairy production. China has alwaysprized pork in its diet, and hogs were tradition-ally raised—and slaughtered—in backyard plots;as recently as 2001, farms with more than 50 hogsmade up just a quarter of the market. By 2015 anestimated three-fourths of China’s hogs werebeing produced on such farms. An expandingappetite for poultry and eggs also has been an-swered by industrial farms. But perhaps the mostsurprising industrialization has been at dairyfarms like the one I visited in Bengbu. Tradition-al production had been household based, as hogswere, but after a 2008 food-safety scandal involv-ing fatally contaminated infant formula, Chinapushed the industry to modernize. In 2008 near-ly one in six dairy farms held 200 or more cows.By 2013 more than one in three did.It’s difficult to overstate the importance offood safety to Chinese consumers. Besides fatallevels of melamine in baby formula, scandalshave included long beans treated with a bannedpesticide and adulterated fox meat passed offas donkey. A 2016 McKinsey & Company studyfound that nearly three-quarters of Chinese cus-tomers worry that the food they eat is harmfulto their health. The vast number of small farmsmakes China’s food system “almost completelyunmanageable in terms of food safety,” says ScottRozelle, an expert on rural China at Stanford Uni-versity. Industrial dairies and slaughterhousesmake traceability and accountability for qualitypossible, and this is something Chinese consum-ers want. Indeed a colloquial phrase traditionallyused to describe being at ease, “Put your heartdown,” has been repurposed. Farmers repeatedlyassured me that I could put my heart down withtheir food; it was, in other words, safe to enjoy.At Modern Farming’s dairy, officials intro-duced me to an employee, Zhang Yunjun, whosefamily home had been where the offices nowstand. The Bengbu farm displaced about a hun-dred villagers, and the government moved thema little way down the road. People in the villagecooperated willingly when officials promisedjobs at the dairy, new housing, and regular in-creases to the rental fee for their land. Before thedairy Zhang had worked about six acres with tworelatives, growing peanuts and wheat. Now 55,he tends to bedding in the barns and earns morethan twice what he did farming. “People are veryhappy,” he says. “It was really hard working as afarmer. Now I can make much more.”Nearly every proponent of large-scale farmstold me some version of this story, saying that bigfarms are effective solutions to poverty in ruralareas. Farmers, the thinking goes, can work forthe big farm and rent out their land, earning twoincomes at once. But the reality doesn’t alwaysmatch the sales pitch. “They do employ people,but it’s very limited,” says Ye Jingzhong, a ruralsociologist at China Agricultural University inBeijing. “If they want to make a profit, the firstthing they want to cut is the labor employment.And they can only employ a very limited amountof low-paid farmworkers.”As the sun began to set, I visited the displacedvillagers and found their enthusiasm for the dairymuch thinner than Zhang’s. They live in a griddedSYSTEM OF SMALL FARMS.