Yangxin County in Shandong sees strong momentum in beef cattle industry development
In a RT-Mart supermarket in Binzhou, Shandong, a reporter picked up a vacuum-packed bag of Yiliyuan brand raw beef and scanned the QR code on the package with a mobile phone. The screen displayed a "Traceability Platform - Query Page," showing information such as the traceability number, ear tag number, and ranch owner of that bag of beef.
"Starting from March 2011, our company invested over 40 million yuan to build Shandong's first IoT beef cattle traceability system," introduced Yang Zhengang, Chairman of Yiliyuan Company. The price of a high-grade fattened cattle is 13 to 14 times that of an ordinary fattened cattle, while the feeding cost is only just over twice as much. To raise high-grade beef cattle, Yiliyuan also invited experts from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences to develop a "nutrition package."
Whole-plant silage corn cobs and stalks are crushed together, placed into silage pits, and after ammoniation, the whole corn plant becomes soft and fragrant feed. This practice is relatively common in dairy cattle farming, but rarely attempted by beef cattle raisers.
Yangxin County was the first in the province to promote the "grain-to-feed" planting model. Yanghu Township's Balipo Village in the county has a total of 3,600 mu of farmland, and this year 2,800 mu was transferred to a well-known local beef cattle breeding and slaughtering enterprise - Yangxin Guangfu Livestock Products Company. "The net income from growing one season of corn is just a few hundred yuan, but silage corn reaches 3,000 yuan, and after conversion through beef cattle, the output value is 4,000 to 5,000 yuan," said Zhao Bin, the village Party secretary. What the enterprise leases land to plant is the rarely seen whole-plant silage corn.
In less than a year, besides enterprises spontaneously transferring land for grain-to-feed conversion, three other models have emerged in the county: First, Jiejian Cattle Industry developed 5,000 mu of contracted orders, providing seeds while farmers handle planting and management; Second, members of beef cattle cooperatives converted their own land to "grain-to-feed," which accounts for the largest portion at tens of thousands of mu; Third, farmer brokers purchase feed corn from farming households. Today in Yangxin, the "grain - cash crop" dual planting structure has become a "grain - cash crop - feed crop" triple planting structure.
"Now Yangxin's beef cattle industry, from growing forage grass and breeding calves, to raising, fattening, slaughtering, cutting, cold storage, cold-chain logistics distribution, catering, and the research and processing of hides, fur, blood and bones, has formed a complete industrial chain," said Ma Fuxiang, Party secretary of Yangxin County.
Yangxin can become a "price highland" in the beef cattle industry because competition here is robust - over ten thousand people work in leather, beef cattle and related peripheral industries alone. Here, cattle manure can also be recycled and fermented into foliar fertilizer and solid fertilizer for growing green organic fruits and vegetables. Cattle blood can be used to extract SOD, which has high medicinal value.
Currently, the beef cattle industry accounts for 41.6% of the county's total agricultural output value, and the total output value of the beef cattle industry has exceeded 350 billion yuan.
In May 2014, Yangxin County signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement on agricultural product e-commerce with Beijing Yimutian Group, opening a Yangxin County specialty industry belt on Yimutian Agricultural Network - currently the largest agricultural product trading platform in China - and conducting in-depth cooperation in agricultural product e-commerce training and big data information.
At the same time, the county's Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau is establishing the Yangxin Halal Beef E-commerce Trading Platform, providing "online" digital image archive supervision of the production processes of participating enterprises, with unified delivery of "Yangxin Halal Beef" brand products. "Offline," the completed Furun Plaza can accommodate 50 to 80 beef cattle production and processing enterprises for centralized display and marketing, and also serves functions such as catering, hotels, product exhibitions, and cultural and skills training. The integrated "online" and "offline" circulation business model will give Yangxin's beef cattle industry development a powerful boost.
Currently, Yangxin County has formulated the "13th Five-Year Plan" for the beef cattle industry. In the next 5 years, Yangxin will build "five zones" - the China Yangxin Beef Cattle Breeding Key Development Zone, the Beef Cattle Slaughtering and Processing and Cold-Chain Logistics Distribution Zone, the Biotechnology Research and Development Zone, the Beef Cattle Leather Deep Processing Zone, and the Muslim-Style Town High-Efficiency Ecological Ethnic Industrial Park - to achieve a complete beef cattle industry chain from forage planting, beef cattle breeding, fattening, slaughtering, deep processing to cold-chain logistics distribution, restaurant chains, and leather deep processing, promote the "Yangxin Halal Beef" brand, strive to become China's number one "cattle" county, and advance the beef cattle industry toward a hundred-billion-level industrial cluster.