Western Cattle's Inner Mongolia ranch and feedlot is geared to the production of high-quality beef
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Farmers are no less pragmatic about their relationship with the cattle buyers and big dairies. In the village of Bingzhouhai, the whims of the market rule the daily rhythms of life. Every morning, farmers who live in courtyard-style homes walk their cows past the patches of lettuce and squash gardens to the small milking station that Yili operates there. Before dairy became a local industry, people used cattle to plow the fields, but there was a better living to be made selling milk than grain. Now, that seems to be changing. "The price of feed is going up, but the milk price is stable," says He Erwen, a farmer who lives in Bingzhouhai with his family of seven. Though his cows cost more to feed now, he's keeping them with hopes that milk prices will climb, restoring his profits. As for the prospect of selling his surplus male calves to a newcomer like Western Cattle, He laughs. "Depends on the price."
Some worry that the livelihoods of small farmers will be threatened as Inner Mongolian agriculture modernizes. Western Cattle is providing farmers with an additional source of income, and the farmers are providing the company with inexpensive labor. But big feedlots in the U.S. are essentially factories, much larger than the biggest in China today, maintaining herds of tens of thousands of animals supplied by dedicated cattle ranches. As the industry grows, farmers could be squeezed out. Even now, they are at the mercy of middlemen like the dairies, which have some control over pricing. The farmers have none. "Only the big companies have the power," says professor Jiang Gaoming, a plant biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
No one expects China's beef industry to be transformed overnight. Others have tried Western production methods and failed. Steffen Schindler, a German butcher who runs two Beijing restaurants and a small meat plant, oversaw the first feedlot and slaughterhouse to sell hamburger meat to McDonald's in China. That joint venture went under after a local company set up a competing operation nearby. But as China keeps growing, Schindler thinks it's inevitable that the mom-and-pop industry will coalesce into large operations. "You cannot meet the demand if you're doing it the old-fashioned way," Schindler says.
Still, if more feedlots like Western Cattle's crop up around the country, communities can expect to deal with a new set of problems. Disease outbreaks in concentrated animal populations can be devastating. Even if the cows and their meat are well monitored and safe, feedlots foul the air and can be a source of water pollution. Growing the massive amount of corn needed to feed herds also means fertilizer and pesticide runoff in water supplies, and trucking feed and meat around the country is a big carbon emitter. Wen Bo, China program director with the NGO Pacific Environment, acknowledges that China's cattle industry needs modernization, but says slapping an American model onto the Chinese landscape won't work. "The situation in China is completely different," he says. "In many rural areas, they do not have the infrastructure for environmental treatment." To mitigate damage, Wen says, big companies and governments will need to invest in the communities they're developing, including funding for programs that help displaced farmers find new lines of work. Without investment, "the booming beef and cattle industry would mean the destruction of the community and environment they rely on," says Wen.
Officials in Hohhot don't see it that way. In the past seven years, the city has almost doubled in both population and physical size, a trend that's in keeping with Inner Mongolia's recent double-digit growth rates. Officials welcome Western Cattle's feedlots as a way to use marginal land, create jobs and produce more food. "If we have a very good feedlot here, it will help people become wealthy," says Teng Guiyuan of Hohhot's Bureau of Investment Attraction. "Small farmers want to make money, but they aren't powerful enough. They need a big company to lead the way."
The whole of China is wrangling with how to develop industry responsibly. But for a farmer like He, the question gets drowned out by how his seven cows are going to make the most money for him and his family. Officials like Teng are busy trying to figure out how to ensure their province does not get skipped in China's race to prosperity.
Timberlake, meanwhile, is buried in the day-to-day realities of getting a business off the ground — choosing a new site for the next feedlot and ranch, getting the word out that he's in the market for cattle, and preventing disease outbreaks in the herd. "Every time you try something new, you have your naysayers," Timberlake says. But he insists Western Cattle is offering Inner Mongolian farmers a better way of life — and some nice, juicy steaks, too.