8 local breeds of pigs are extinct! Our dining table is mostly "foreign pigs"? ! Where did the local "Second Brother" go?
my country is a big pig-raising country and a big pork-consuming country, both of which account for half of the global market.
In the pig industry, there is a jargon called "a good litter for sows and a good circle for boars". Breeding pigs are the "chips" of pigs.
However, it is regrettable that most of the breeding pigs in our country are from abroad. In this case, once the supply of imported breeding pigs is cut off, the consequences are unimaginable.
From 480,000 to just over 100, what happened to the pigs here?
Yanan pig is a unique breed in the hilly areas of Sichuan. In the 1970s, the number of breeding pigs once reached more than 70,000, but in just a few decades, only more than 200 are left.
Exotic pigs are quickly released for slaughter and have a high lean meat rate. For farmers, the same cost is invested and the benefits are higher, and Yanan pigs are gradually eliminated in the local area.
Luo Jiasong, Party Secretary, Erlong Village, Jiaguan Town, Qionglai City, Sichuan Province
In 2007, Yanan pigs were on the verge of extinction.
Today, Li Peilin’s breeding farm is the only original Yanan pig breeding farm in the country. The core source of more than 200 Yanan pigs here was searched from house to house after several years of traversing mountains and ridges. Once infected, they will be completely extinct. Up.
In the 1970s, Yanan pig was one of the 48 excellent local black pig breeds in my country. It was once the "black hairy pig of every family" in western Sichuan.
But today, the number of Yanan pigs is even scarcer than that of giant pandas.
And not only the Yanan pig is endangered. According to a set of official data in 2016, 8 of the 90 indigenous pig breeds unique to my country have become extinct, and 29 are endangered and endangered.
Sichuan is a major pig province. In 2020, the number of pigs for slaughter reached 56.144 million, ranking first in the country.
At the same time, Sichuan is also a major province of livestock and poultry resources in my country. There are currently 6 local pig breed resources. Among them, the most well-known is Chenghua pig. The raw material for classic Sichuan cuisine twice-cooked meat is Chenghua pig.
According to the Chengdu Agricultural Yearbook, there were more than 480,000 pigs in the city's Chenghua pigs in 1985, and they were the protagonist of meat on the dinner table of Chengdu people.
However, the influx of foreign breeding pigs has had an impact on local black pigs.
Farmers have switched to raising lower-cost foreign pigs. The number of local Chenghua pigs is decreasing. As of 2013, there are only more than 100 Chenghua pigs. This local breeding pig that has been developed in the Chengdu Plain for more than 2,000 years is on the verge of extinction.
After nearly 10 years of hard work by Chenghua Original Pig Farm, there are now more than 1,600 pigs in stock.
Chenghua pigs grow slowly, but they eat more feed than foreign white pigs. The cost of Tian Xiaochu's one-year maintenance cost is more than 6 million.
In order to maintain the expenses of the breeding farm, they will sell part of the pigs every year, and only maintain a core population of about 200 heads, so that they can barely achieve a balance of income and expenditure.
The reporter visited a number of domestic pig breeding farms in China, and almost all of them faced difficulties like Chenghua Pig and Yanan Pig.
In the current consumer market, the market share of local pigs in China has dropped from over 90% in the last century to 2% at present. That is to say, most of the pork on our daily table is foreign pigs.
Local pig breeding is even more difficult, and core technology must be mastered
On March 14, 2021, after more than 9 hours of long-distance flight, a cargo flight of 1,200 breeding pigs from Denmark landed at Hefei Xinqiao International Airport in Anhui.
On the same day, 2,400 original American pigs Great White, Landrace, and Duroc also arrived in Yibin, Sichuan.
These pigs that have come to China "not far away" are foreign breeding pigs known as "pig chips".
my country is the world's largest producer and consumer of pork, and there is a huge demand for breeding pigs.
In 2020, there will be about 30,000 imported breeding pigs, a record high. The number of imported breeding pigs has exceeded 10,000 from January to March 2021, and the number of imported breeding pigs has increased year by year.
This situation worries Zhu Li, a professor at Sichuan Agricultural University.
Zhu Li, Professor of Sichuan Agricultural University
If you want to get rid of dependence on foreign sources, you must continue to select and breed imported second-generation breeding pigs on the existing basis, and finally obtain your own domestic breeding pigs.
At present, my country's pig breeding industry has only attached importance to introduction for a long time, and is unwilling to breed. It has fallen into a vicious circle of introduction, degradation, re-introduction, and re-degeneration.
The core source of breeding pigs is always in the hands of others. Once cut off, it will have a huge impact on the efficiency of domestic pig breeding.
In 2012, Zou Zhongyou made a bold decision to establish a complete breeding system for breeding pigs and breed his own breeding pigs.
This decision means that he needs to eliminate all the more than 1,000 three-generation breeding pigs he bought before and buy the latest breeding pigs again.
Not only that, all new breeding pigs must be selected as a priority and cannot be fattened or sold. In this way, not only will there be no income in the short term, but also a large amount of investment will be required.
For three full years, after every 100 breeding pigs were selected and bred, only two or three could be used as breeding pigs, and ten to twenty were used as second-generation boar candidates. The remaining pigs could only be eliminated and sold as commercial pigs.
Although the funds were tight, Zou Zhongyou never gave up. After more than three years of careful selection and breeding, he finally selected his own original pig.
Today, this national-level core breeding farm has more than 4,000 original breeding pigs and more than 2,400 parent breeding pigs.
In 2020, a total of 20,000 breeding pigs will be provided to the domestic market.
Zou Zhongyou also slowly walked out of debts of tens of millions of yuan, and tasted the dividends brought by breeding.
Nowadays, Zou Zhongyou's breeding pigs are very popular, and farmers who are queuing to buy need to wait patiently until half a year later.
In fact, at present, the domestic supply of breeding pigs is far from being able to meet the market demand, and introducing breeds from abroad is still the kingly way.
However, the African Swine Fever, which has continued to the present in 2018, has greatly reduced foreign sources, and domestic sources are unavailable, which has dealt a heavy blow to some domestic pig companies.
Yue Liang is a local medium-scale breeder in Bazhong, and her pig farm once reached more than 1,000 sows.
However, under the influence of African swine fever, Yue Liang's pig farm was forced to close for rectification in 2019. So far, Yue Liang, who has been in the pig industry for 14 years, has not bought breeding pigs, and his business is still in a state of suspension. .
There is a huge gap in the price of introduced species at home and abroad, but queuing to introduce species is far away.
There are still many domestic farmers who are facing difficulties like Yue Liang, which is also an important reason for the decline in domestic pork production year after year.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, my country's pork production was 54.04 million tons in 2018, 42.55 million tons in 2019, and 41.13 million tons in 2020.
At the same time, the volume of pork imports has increased year by year. According to the data of the General Administration of Customs, the annual import of pork in 2019 was 2.108 million tons, and the import of pork in 2020 was 4.392 million tons.
Zhu Li believes that it is imminent to master the core breeding technology of provenance, whether it is a foreign pig or a local pig.
Half an hour observation: rise up to solve the problem of "stuck neck" of provenance
Pork is the most common ingredient on our table. However, the domestic pig breeding industry introduces a large number of breeds from abroad, and the phenomenon of "emphasizing introduction, neglecting cultivation, focusing on hybridization and neglecting protection" is common, and encounters the risk of "stuck neck", which greatly restricts the development of my country's pig industry. "Fighting up the battle for the seed industry; in-depth implementation of joint research on crops and improved livestock and poultry breeds; implementation of a new round of livestock and poultry genetic improvement plans and modern seed industry upgrading projects", the No. 1 Central Document in 2021, has a positive impact on my country's livestock and poultry germplasm resources A series of deployments have been made for protection and utilization, which pointed out the direction for solving the "stuck neck" problem of pig germplasm resources. One point for deployment, nine points for implementation, we expect more pig breeding companies to learn from the pain, innovate in breeding, increase the rate of core breeds, and firmly control the “breeding” of pigs in the hands of the Chinese.