On November 22, 2012, villagers in Guanshan Village, Jinzhou Township, Ningxiang County, Hunan Province, drove their native pigs to Gaotai for diving exercises to improve the quality and taste of pork. Visual China Infographic
After living leisurely for more than 9,000 years, China's pigs will also begin to worry about their future.
From 1980 to 2000, the number of sows in Guangdong's Dahua White Pig dropped from 13,000 to several hundred. The number of sows in Jinhua fell from nearly 250,000 in 1980 to more than 10,000 in 2007. In some places, pig breeds, and even "boars can no longer be found". Pig breeds such as the Parmesan pig, the Jiangkou radish pig, and the Guanzhuang flower pig were once endangered. Dingxian pigs, Longyou black pigs and narrow black pigs have become extinct.
In other words, these pigs are going to turn into rare animals if they are not careful.
Wang Lixian, who is engaged in pig genetics and breeding research at the Beijing Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, proposed in 2014 that "the selection and breeding of china's local pig breeds cannot be delayed". Chen Qingming, a professor at China Agricultural University, even warned in an interview that "the extinction of pig breeds is also an ecological disaster."
In order to defend the pigsty, the Pig Breeding Branch of the Chinese Society of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine took the lead in establishing a local pig breed resources protection and utilization cooperation group. The Animal Husbandry Law of the People's Republic of China stipulates that "the state shall establish a system for the protection of livestock and poultry genetic resources, and people's governments at all levels shall take measures to strengthen the protection of livestock and poultry genetic resources".
In 2012, the central government's livestock and poultry breeding fund increased to 53.2 million yuan. Four years later, the then Ministry of Agriculture released the "13th Five-Year Plan for the Protection and Utilization of Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources" data showing that there are a total of 90 local breeds of "native pigs" in China, including 42 national-level protected varieties, 32 provincial-level protected varieties, and 15 other varieties. These local pig breeds have been included in the National Inventory for the Protection of Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources and implemented key protection.
But this crisis in the backyard of humanity should not be taken lightly. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations mentioned at a conference that about 22 percent of the world's livestock breeds are at risk of extinction. Curbing the decline in genetic diversity in livestock has become "an urgent task". Following the meeting, the organization implemented a regional project in the South-West Pacific to establish chicken and pig conservation centres in the Cook Islands, Fiji and Niue.
"Some populations don't necessarily have much value at the moment, but they are at stake in the future of animal genetic resources, which is like climate change." Curbing the loss of genetic diversity in livestock is related to the future of human development. "Un experts appealed at this meeting.
The choice of the market
The crisis in the pigsty first caused a shock at the dinner table.
Sichuan has a pot of meat, the northeast has a pig killing dish, and each of the eight major cuisines has a pork practice. Jinhua ham to use Jinhua pig, Yunnan roast suckling pig to use Yunnan small ear pig, classic Sichuan cuisine back to the pot meat should use Sichuan Chenghua pig.
Jiang Yanzhi, a professor at Sichuan Agricultural University and a special expert at Chengdu Breeding Farm, said that purebred Chenghua pigs can reach 3.5% in muscle fat content, while white pigs usually only 1%. The level of fat content in the muscle determines whether the pork is delicious or not.
However, the expert who specializes in breeding and breeding for Chenghua pigs told the China Youth Daily reporter that when the situation was most critical a few years ago, the local Chenghua pigs in Sichuan "only have fifty or sixty heads left", which is rarer than giant pandas.
Jiang Yanzhi remembers that thirty or forty years ago, most peasant households in Guanghan, Shifang, Deyang and other places in Sichuan still saw this kind of pig breed with black hair, wide waist, wide hips, and short limbs. Since the 1980s, improved pig breeds have been promoted nationwide, and fewer and fewer people have raised Chinese pigs.
Not only Chenghua pigs, but also varieties such as changbai pigs native to Denmark, Yorkshire pigs native to the United Kingdom, and Duroc pigs from the United States have successively entered China, these commercial pigs known as "Du Growing Up" and "Yang Sanyuan" have quickly occupied China's pork market and farms. At the same time, the number of sows of local breeds in China has decreased rapidly.
Local pigs "fight" and do not win foreign pigs, one is because of "fat", and the other is because of "slow". The lean meat rate of Chenghua pigs is only about 40%, while the lean meat rate of white pigs of foreign ancestry can reach 60%, and "everyone does not want to eat fat meat.". Moreover, in general, Chinese native pigs can only be fed for one year to get out of the pen, and foreign pigs can be fed for 6 months. "Actually, this is the choice of the market." Jiang Yanzhi sighed.
The earliest known evidence of Chinese pig breeding appears in the early cultural layer of the Guilin Jiaopiyan site in Guangxi, which dates back about 9,000 years. The pig bone traits unearthed there, which differ from those in the wild, are obviously changes brought about by artificial domestication. Six or seven thousand years ago, China began to raise pigs with wooden fences. By the Han Dynasty, there were already people who specialized in breeding pig mating.
In other words, the pigsty, which took thousands of years to tie, became "unrecognizable" in only a few decades.
The earth pig crisis is not only in China, but in the Yorkshire pig's home country of Britain, the most popular pig of the 1920s was originally the big black pig that originated in Cornwall in the 16th and 17th centuries. It has been exported to many European countries, and even crossed the ocean to many countries and regions such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Africa.
However, after the Second World War, the intensive indoor pig breeding model began to spread, and the number of large black pigs in britain, which was more suitable for outdoors, fell sharply. By the 1960s, the Big Black Pig had become one of the rarest local pig breeds. In 1973, the big black pig was even put on the list of critically endangered livestock.
Pigs facing a species crisis are not just domesticated domestic pigs, the situation of wild boars is even more hanging. The Visayan warthog, native to the Philippines, is currently critically endangered. Deforestation and farmland development have left these dark gray pigs less and less. The Chaco wild boar, which lives in South America, is on the verge of extinction due to the destruction of the ecological environment and the spread of diseases between livestock. A small pygmy pig that had fewer than 250 adult pigs in 1996.
Human development is compressing the living space of pigs little by little. After the reform and opening up, in order to meet the market demand, the domestic pig breed hybridization has been widely carried out. Ding Mei, who studies animal genetics, breeding and reproduction at Guizhou Agricultural Vocational College, mentioned in her paper that China has become "the country with the most foreign pig breeding resources".
Genetic Defense War
In the breed war of pigs, Chinese native pigs originally had the advantage. They can be raw and delicious. As early as the ancient Roman era, Westerners introduced Chinese Guangdong pig breeds, cross-bred Tonkin pigs. In the early 18th century, the Cantonese pig breed introduced by the British was the ancestor of the later Yorkshire pig and the Bakshire pig. The Bozhong pig and the Chester white pig in the United States also have the pedigree of the Chinese native pig.
However, in 2008, when the second national survey of livestock and poultry genetic resources initiated by the then Ministry of Agriculture was completed, 8 local pig breeds such as Hengjing pigs could no longer be found, and 4 breeds such as Shenxian pigs and Xiangcheng pigs had been determined to be extinct. This statistical survey shows that about 85% of the local pig breeds in China have a downward trend in the number of groups, and 31 breeds are endangered and endangered.
In order to protect the dwindling number of local pig breeds in China, some researchers have proposed methods such as frozen semen preservation, embryo preservation, and biotechnology seed preservation. However, these methods are still in the experimental stage, the technology is not yet mature, and it is difficult to determine whether they can successfully preserve the seeds.
Compared with these methods that are still in the experimental stage, the more effective method is live seed preservation. The state and local governments have successively established breeding farms, casting nets to collect those increasingly rare local pigs and breeding pigs, and keeping them in captivity and protection.
The primary task of live breeding is to maintain the existing traits of the breeding pigs, and try not to change the existing appearance and production performance. As the population size expands, it can be cross-bred through "hybridization between different strains within the population" or "hybridization with exogenous pigs or other breeds of pigs" while retaining the original characteristics of local pigs.
In January 1996, the then Ministry of Agriculture approved the establishment of the "National Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources Management Committee", under which there was a professional committee for the approval of pig breeds. In August 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture published a list of 78 national breed resources protection, including 19 pig breed resources.
"Different stages have different stages of demand." Wang Lixian told the China Youth Daily China Youth Online reporter, "Once the introduction of foreign pigs was to solve the problem of insufficient meat to eat, and now the protection of native pigs is to solve the needs of taste and protect genetic diversity." ”
Jiang Yanzhi explained to reporters that the more diverse genes are, it is less likely to be "a pot end" when a certain disease strikes.
China's native pigs, which were raised by the people themselves in the countryside in the past, have been breeding for thousands of years in a very harsh and harsh natural environment, and have been handed down to the present, and their ability to resist the bad environment and disease resistance are stronger. The white pigs introduced now are not naturally hybridized, but breeds that have been bred "in a very good environment for a long time", and the resistance to stress is a little lower.
In addition, the genetic diversity of pigs has more significance for humans. The five-fingered mountain pig "has dozens of physiological indicators similar to the numerical values of human projects", and the Chongqing Rongchang pig has a congenital deafness gene that can be studied by scientists. Protecting the genes of local pigs is also protecting "an important gene pool that meets the unforeseen factors of the future." These genetic resources are unique and non-renewable.
During the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" period, a total of 79 pig breeding farms and 3 gene banks were built in various parts of China, and 37 local pig breed protection areas were demarcated nationwide. These include three national protected areas, such as Ningxiang pigs, Rongchang pigs and Tibetan pigs, and 35 pig genetic resource breeding farms such as Taihu pigs, civil pigs and Huanghuaihai black pigs.
The conservation of Chenghua pigs has also received attention since 2013. Chengdu Breeding Farm, Qiongxia Jialin Ecological Farm and Sichuan Agricultural University Pig Genetics and Breeding R&D Team reached a cooperation to divide the Chenghua pig herd into two groups: breeding preservation and breeding. The goal of the breeding group is to let the Chenghua pigs maintain the current breed characteristics, expand the number of groups, control the degree of inbreeding, and ensure that the genetic genes are not lost. The goal of the breeding group is to improve the growth, meat production and reproductive performance of Chenghua pigs. In terms, it is to "rejuvenate" the entire population.
By the end of 2018, the basic breeding group of Chenghua pigs in Chengdu Breeding Farm and Qiongxia Jialin Ecological Farm had 16 boars, 8 families, and 150 sows; the core breeding group had 20 boars and 300 sows.
New hope
Sichuan province now produces about 50 million pigs a year, of which nearly 40 million go into the stomachs of locals. Jiang Yanzhi hopes that the proportion of native pigs can be higher, which is less than 2% now.
In the third week of December 2018, the average price of pork in the country was 21.01 yuan per kilogram, of which the price of ordinary pork was about 17 yuan per kilogram, and some native pork that took the high-end market route was packed in an elaborate box, and the price was often two to three times that of ordinary pork.
40 years ago, the market chose foreign pigs, and now the sharp tongue of Chinese diners has made another choice. More and more people are beginning to care about a question: why is pork not delicious now? The pursuit of delicious food has become the driving force for some diners to buy native pork.
This dynamic also brings hope to the Chinese native pig. In the whole of 2017, China's pork production was 53.4 million tons, and 688.61 million pigs were out of the barn. Although Chinese eats a lot of pork, in the world, it is not the most developed country in terms of quality and quantity of pigs. In the international market, China's pig inventory and pork production account for 50% of the world's total, but the number of pork exports, accounting for only 3% of the world's total pork exports. The price of exported pork is about 30% lower than that of pork exported by the United States.
The changes in the market made Jiang Yanzhi feel that the Chinese native pigs may have the strength to fight again. Chinese native pigs with better "meat quality characteristics and stress resistance" can one day become a breakthrough in improving the international competitiveness of the Chinese pork market.
Native pork, which is entering the high-end market, can use more than twice the unit price to make up for the disadvantage of slow production and high cost. "Keeping the cost at 1.2 to 1.5 times that of white pig farming, and the market price is more than twice that of it, it will certainly be profitable." Therefore, how to improve the comprehensive production performance of black pigs is the key. Jiang Yanzhi said.
Chengdu Breeding Farm is improving and cross-breeding the Chenghua pig breed. The researchers want to breed a new pig breed, which is as suitable as Chenghua pigs for making thick-skinned meat, and as lean as foreign pigs, growing fast.
The new breed being bred has not yet been named, but what makes Jiang Yanzhi happy is that this new hybrid breed can grow an average of 1 catty per day, which means that this pig can be out of the pen for up to 8 months, and the breeding cost is greatly reduced. At present, there are more than 1,000 breeding pigs of the new breed, which have been bred to the fourth generation. Generally speaking, by the fifth generation, the genetic characteristics will be stabilized. Jiang Yanzhi speculated that "it will probably take a year or two of research and development", and the market potential is very large.
In addition to these breeding farms, well-known e-commerce platforms have begun to raise pigs, and not long ago, they also developed the technology of "artificial intelligence pig raising" and "pig face recognition".
"Now the state and the industry are trying to protect the seeds, although there are various problems, but if you ignore the efforts of the industry, it is biased." Wang Ruinian, who develops a pigsty information management system at a technology company, said.
New technologies are constantly being installed in pigsty. More and more pig farms are beginning to use data management systems, feeding feed to machines, pigs pregnant to b ultrasound, and even information such as how many times pigs have mated must be uploaded to the cloud.
As Wang Ruinian wrote in a self-introduction, in this era, pig breeding also needs product managers.