National Geographic

102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • FEBRUARY 2018park and corporate offices, where it’s easy to in-tuit another less discussed selling point of giantfarms: money. Experts may debate what sizefarm will produce the most food per acre, butindustrial farms still generate profit far morereadily than small ones. CP Group is working toensure that; the group has hired leading Ameri-can business academics, as well as consultantssuch as McKinsey & Company, to help it succeed.When I visited the Cixi park in August, it wassweltering and humid, and Wang whisked meinto a highly air-conditioned boardroom fora PowerPoint presentation. We moved on tolunch in an executive dining room with a wallit as a paragon of vertical integration. “Therelationship of human and land should be in har-mony,” he says. He sees the food- manufacturingsystem that CP Group is building as a way toaccomplish that. For eggs that means growinggrain for poultry feed, breeding chickens, thenslaughtering and processing them once they arespent. Dumpling dough will be made from CPGroup wheat and filled with the company’s meatand produce. To sell its products, the companyhas its own grocery stores. It’s an impressivevision, if nothing goes awry. But if, say, listeriawere to end up in its fruits, contamination couldspread far more widely and rapidly than in a de-centralized system—as Americans have learned.Nearly all the large-scale farms in China arerun by the government, cooperatives, and busi-nesses, but I also met Liu Lin, a farmer in InnerMongolia who has become well-off by growingalfalfa for industrial dairies. As a teen ager Liuheard a radio broadcast about American farm-ing and its use of machines to till the land. Thissounded better than breaking up soil by handwith a hoe, and he became obsessed. Over timeLiu persuaded local governments to rent himabout 2,470 acres. He bought sophisticatedagricultural machines from the U.S. and Europethat, in four hours, could finish what had taken30 workers 20 days to do.By the time I met Liu last summer, his farm hadseveral giant barns, barracks for workers, a set ofoffices and carports, and a two-story villa over-looking a pond. I watched, impressed, as a Frenchsilage baler rumbled across a field. In 89 secondsit vacuumed up mowed alfalfa, compressed it intoa 1,700-pound cylinder, encircled it in plastic, anddischarged it onto the field.Later Liu took his car, a Lexus SUV, to town toget it washed; his daughter-in-law drove me tomeet him in her husband’s Lexus sedan, play-ing Amy Winehouse on the stereo. In the din ofthe car wash, I asked how much he earns: Morethan 10,000 yuan—$1,505—a month? I couldn’thear his response, but I saw him smile. Later myinterpreter told me he had emphatically said,yes, he made more than that—a lot more.I thought of Liu during my visit to CP Group’s