Word: feedlots
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...Mueller and his partners chose to set up their first feedlot outside Hohhot, Inner Mongolia's capital, partly because of the local government's aggressive pro-investment policies. Among other things, officials helped the company find land and provided introductions to potential business partners. Ultimately, though, it came down to the fact that Hohhot is a cow town. Two of China's biggest dairies, Mengniu and Yili, have headquarters in the area, and buy milk from thousands of farmers who raise dairy cows in their front yards. There are more than a million cows around Hohhot; the bustling city...
...Western Cattle is counting on the same farmers to help them push their agenda for beef. The private company doesn't breed cows; it buys them, fattens them up on a feedlot and then trucks them off to the slaughterhouse. Today, the half million male calves born every year around Hohhot are mostly sold to blood-serum companies that render the animals' plasma into products such as cosmetics. Timberlake, who is the on-site manager for Western Cattle in China, has been going head to head with serum companies since he arrived six months ago, hitting the dairies and villages...
...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...
...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...
...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...