AI and pig farming? Sounds unlikely. But in China, it's becoming a data-driven operation.
Voice prints, thermal scans, facial recognition.
Tools once used in labs are tracking pigs from birth to the dinner table.
In George Orwell's animal farm, the pigs took control, but here they are under constant watch.
With food safety and sustainability in the spotlight, AI pig farms in China are changing how meat is raised and harvested. and how we think about livestock farming itself.
Coming to you live from Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm He Young. For today's program, I'm joined by Steve Hatherly and Yushan in the studio.
First on today's show... Flies, filth and a foul smell.
This used to be the default impression of a pigsty.
But step into one of China's newest AI-powered farms, you're more likely to see data dashboards, infrared sensors and pigs enjoying air-conditioned rooms.
Pork is central to the Chinese diet. In 2024, every person in China on average consumed over 30 kilograms of it.
To meet this demand sustainably, the industry is going through a tech-driven makeover.
AI pig farming is no longer a futuristic fantasy, is already reshaping how pork possibly gets to your plate.
Yushan, tell us about this. What AI tools are being used on these pig farms?
It's amazing. AI tools is kind of everywhere, isn't it?
I know that here in China, we have a huge variety of different styles of food.
There's halal food, there's vegetarian styles as well.
But it's undeniable that pork is a necessity on Chinese people's dinner table.
And to better satisfy our need for poor consumption, the advanced AI technologies have already been adopted by many top domestic pig farming enterprises. to transfer the traditional pigsty.
So they turn traditional pig farms into data-driven, highly automated ecosystems.
So here's how the AI technologies are being used.
We're seeing a whole range of AI technologies there, including the smart sensors that's constantly checking the temperature, the humidity inside the pig farms, and also the gas levels, even how the animals are behaving.
I read about one very interesting news saying that they can even spot maybe some potential injuries or maybe this one pig is not behaving so well.
So probably it will need a better check later on.
So all of these are part of the new technologies that's been involved here.
And there are also voice and image recognition systems, like you said, He Yang, that can spot signs of distress or illness early on.
So that's where we're getting right now.
Yeah, really popular, not popular, really a necessary part of the Chinese diet, right?
I found that to be interesting. I looked it up because I was curious to know in the States, the number per capita presumption of pork is is nearly identical in America, but it's only 50% of that in Canada.
It's only 15.03 kilograms per person. I didn't have time to find out why that is, so that's all I have to say about that particular topic, but I just thought that was kind of interesting to know about.
But yeah, Yushan, you said it's surprising that AI can be applied in this type, because we've talked about AI in agriculture before, right? using smart sensors and cameras and drones and things like that.
But maybe it shouldn't be so surprising because of what is possible here and what can be learned from the pig farmers handling so many heads of pigs, right?
And it's not necessarily a new thing either.
Back in 2019, it was in January of that year, there was a high-tech enterprise in the field of agricultural internet.
It was here in Beijing, as a matter of fact.
And they launched a New Year's gift box and it had sausages and bacon and pork ribs and they were all inside.
And they were from pigs fully utilizing the enterprise's AI intelligent pig raising solution.
Now, what does that mean? It means that a pig has its own identity QR code from the time it's born until the time it. unfortunately ends up in that box.
But all the data will be stored through blockchain, and that includes the production management data, the inspection data, the transaction data, all different types of data.
And consumers can learn all of that information just from scanning the QR code on the gift box with their mobile phone.
So the tech has been applied to the industry, maybe not in the same way we're seeing it today, but it has been applied to the industry for at least the last few years.
Yeah, but at that time, it was more like a...
Forgive me for saying this, tech marketing gimmick.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. But it got people's attention.
And now what's interesting is that a lot of these farms, or at least a number of these farms, really have seemed to go for that tech makeover.
Yeah. this is kind of new. In the past, maybe there was all this talk or and also applications of tech being used in traditional farming of vegetables and it's not a real living animal, you know?
So I think the impact on people learning about this is kind of different as well.
And I think it's almost like a different mindset to look at the livestock farming industry nowadays.
And what are the differences between AI pork and traditionally raised pork?
Which one do you think is actually better?
But, you know, let's look at what's new here.
I think regarding better or not, the quality, of course, we're going to mention it later on in the discussion as well.
But with AI, we're not really making scientific meat out of nowhere.
It's only on the upgrading of the system that's used in the farms.
So one major, say, upgrade, of course, is the environment within the pig farms, because traditional pig farms, they are often messy and smelly, like in the beginning, how you mentioned it, He Yang, and also it includes intensive amount of human labor in participating in all the different processes as well.
And it relies on basic infrastructures. But nowadays with the AI-powered pig farms, they are a whole different story.
They're building this whole different story here.
There's clean and odor-controlled and also highly automated systems.
And these farms nowadays, they use sensors and smart ventilation system to maintain a relatively good environment for pig growth at all different times and stages.
And take an AI pig farm in central China's Zhejiang province, I think, sorry, that's eastern China, Zhejiang province, for example.
So each pixie there is equipped with air conditioning, automatic water supply and feeding systems as well.
And there's also deodorization tech and even inspection robots to keep things running smoothly.
So We see that it's not really man-making artificial meat in any ways, just the technology.
I've lived in apartments that weren't as nice as some of these pigsties.
Also, if you want to compare traditional pig farming...
Well, there you're relying on human beings.
Sure, you're still in the modern sense relying on human beings to monitor the data and things like this.
But you were relying on people to observe the animals for their health conditions and just how they were doing in general.
But now... AI takes care of all of that with real-time monitoring.
That adopts image recognition, sound analysis, biometric sensors.
And then the staff, the humans, can easily look for problems like insufficient feed.
That would be easy to figure out, right?
Bad sanitation, also easy to figure out.
But also more important things like potential disease systems.
And so these staff, they can monitor the pig styes in real time.
They can do that at that farm you were talking about in Zhejiang.
They can monitor the stye in real time on their smartphone, you know, if they happen to be somewhere else.
Yeah. And also when it comes to feeding in traditional styles of farming, the feeding schedules, they're usually very fixed with you know, just formulas that's based on general experiences from previous farming industries, let's say.
But nowadays they are making things more dynamic by adding AI to adjust the feed formulas in real time based on growth data, just how things are going on, particularly in this pig farm and adjustable and optimizable at any time needed.
For example, in Chengdu, the city of Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan province, they are using AI to optimize feed ratios and monitor their pig growth, which helps lower feeding costs, of course.
And also Liu Yonghao, who is the president of the company running the farm, he explained that by using AI to adjust feeding plans, they've reduced the feed-to-pork conversion ratio, which significantly cuts down on the production cost for each pig.
So it's good for the industry as well. Breeding too.
I find this to be a little bit intrusive.
I feel bad for the pigs about this one, but they use infrared sensors and behavioral data to know when the optimal mating windows are.
They can predict that with very high accuracy.
That's a bit, I don't know, we complain about advertising companies tracking our online data and we're using infrared cameras and such to know when pigs are ready for mating season.
But still, it's just another example of what AI is capable of doing and another example of how efficient the farmers can actually be.
Also, The pigs could use a little more privacy, I feel.
But anyway, so many sensors everywhere, you know, being monitored all the time.
Yeah. Every little move and action and even it seems like mood change can be monitored.
This is really helping the industry in terms of saving costs, like you guys mentioned, in terms of the amount of feed that goes into the farm, as well as employing potentially less people to do the work.
And also, this is really, shall I say, dirty and heavy work.
So some... You can argue, you know, yeah, maybe the jobs are going to be slashed, but also maybe human power could be devoted to something else that's better working condition for people.
That's the counter argument, right? You can make the argument that jobs will be lost, but yeah, those jobs can be kind of sent to... places that need them a little bit more.
In the past, you'd need a whole lot of people to take care of thousands of pigs, right?
For everything from feeding to cleaning to what have you.
But now the labor has been reduced to the point where a single technician can manage the same number of pigs with the same AI system.
The Chengdu Pig Farm, it adopts AI weight estimation technology that So this replaces the traditional manual weighing, and that really reduces labor intensity.
Imagine trying to convince a pig to step on a scale.
Well, now AI can figure that out for you.
Well, yeah, and if you just look a bit further, then it's also expected that one technician could eventually oversee a farm with as many as 10,000 pigs.
That's one human labor versus 10,000 pigs, all thanks to AI.
So in the future, like you mentioned, Hoyoung, it's probably only need maybe fewer, if not fewer and fewer people, manual labor in this pig farming industry.
And also more people can be allocated to maybe on the R&D side.
Or doing other things. Yeah, or doing other things.
The health of the pigs is, what they can do now is really impressive too.
Yeah. The AI can detect abnormalities. I think we said it already via voice prints and behavior analysis.
For example, I didn't know this. I was on some really strange websites this morning, by the way, researching this, but I found out that you can tell how. healthy a pig is or isn't from their vocalizations, they have very specific cough sounds.
I didn't realize this before. They've got a bunch of different types of coughs and a different type of cough from a pig will indicate a different type of problem.
Now, if you have human staff who's not familiar with that, then you would have a difficult time with early detection if something were wrong with the pig.
But AI can pick up on that very early on, and this can help solve those health problems.
That's very interesting. Let me just sort of make a small detour.
But the more you study the pigs, the more you understand its coughs and all these other things.
I just feel, as an industry outsider, obviously... the more I care about the pig's well-being, the less I want to eat it.
But anyway, this is a different topic for a different day, obviously.
And we're seeing that this is giving production a boost.
So essentially, this is about spending less time on a pig for it to be ready for harvest.
And like, I don't know how you feel about this, Yushan.
In China, like, already we've heard these sort of discussions about the shorter the time span a farm animal experiences, the less good the meat might taste or, you know, people would appreciate it in a way.
So, but this is about boosting efficiency.
And we're seeing that, yeah, even with a huge pig, it doesn't take that long to raise anymore.
Yeah. And in the previous cases, it raises questions, isn't it?
What are the pigs being fed in order to grow that fast?
But nowadays it's being Just simply shortening that cycle with AI technology participating to help boost the whole process while improving the feed conversion rates.
So this is a key metric used in animal farming to measure how efficiently an animal converts feed into body weight.
And the process also lowers feed. the cost per pig, and the higher meat quality consistency, etc.
So the efficiency of the Zhejiang AI pig farm, for example, they have increased by more than three times compared to before installing the AI system.
And the cost of pig farming has decreased by about 20%.
So that's just on the technological side of view.
They're just helping to boost up the whole process instead of, you know, having people being curious about the process.
That cost can, you know, that increase in efficiency and that decrease in cost can be passed on to consumers as well.
And we already heard the numbers of how important pork is in the Chinese diet.
So therefore, if there are cost savings to be had, that could benefit people's wallets.
That's what I used to think. But we can probably go into a bit more detail later on that apparently AI pork is expensive.
It's more expensive than average traditionally raised pork.
And that's most possibly because of the huge amount of initial cost investment that needs to go into this.
Think about a whole building with so many sensors that need to be equipped and all this AI technology that is spilling everywhere.
And that's all very costly. Yeah, well, yeah, you bring it up.
So let's get to it right now. That's one of the real challenges faced by the industry today.
Is this only applicable to really large enterprises?
Because it's really expensive. And so far, it has been largely associated with these bigger companies.
And that's because of the need for funding and tech. and talent so these ai systems that like you said the sensors the cameras the feeders the automatic feeders the cloud data platforms these don't come cheap do they so you need a lot of capital investment you need money to pay for these types of things and a lot of these smaller or medium-sized enterprises just can't afford that that price tag at least not at this time.
And let's stay on that for a second. For most Chinese people, and let's just still face this, that we're a vast country.
If you only look at Beijing and Shanghai, it is hardly representative of the whole of China.
There are still many corners in this country that where having hong shou rou, that super delicious braised pork, is not something you can enjoy every day.
And people really want to include pork into their diet as an important source of protein.
And so for folks like this price sensitivity is something you know you have to endure every day and therefore when you say some ai pork is actually more expensive why would i convert you know people would go for the cheaper option so how do you feel about this you know with but you shan could Okay, not Yushan per se, but with some like, you know, young urban dwellers who are very much, who very much enjoy like tech upgrades or whatnot.
I can understand that they might be very much attracted to AI pork and with all the benefits and advantages that we mentioned earlier just now, then that's a great reason for them to shop for it.
But do you think for the bigger market, how will Chinese consumers compete sort of respond to AI pork.
Well, to answer your further question before the current one, I think there's a reason why this whole AI system is landing on the bigger, say, pork farms at this point because of their scale.
They have such a big farm and such a very higher, relatively more higher end system may help them in managing and keeping the farm operating in a higher efficiency.
But for smaller city and smaller places with smaller pig farms, I would assume, such higher end and definitely more pricey system is not necessarily the best solution for them.
And on that notion, some cities are trying to attract some governmental subsidies or grants on just you know, having this agricultural tech subsidies to support digital transformation in their agricultural development as one solution.
It's happening earlier this year in Suzhou in eastern China's Jiangsu province that it's rolling out 12 support measures to boost the development of AI plus agriculture, that's large scale model that they're using right now, and including offering up to 1 million yuan or about 139,000 US dollars in reward for individual projects.
And then later on, coming back to how the public is accepting it, as someone who is, you know, growing up in such an era where technological advancements is basically everywhere in my personal life for example I would say that if it's traceable as you guys mentioned if it has that code for me to stay transparent about how it's being how the process is done how the breeding the the processing and the marketing is all like that it's all you know traceable in that case then yeah I wouldn't Quality, let's say, is not the first thing I would doubt.
And that the price, given the very higher-end and very holistic system that's provided in front of me, I would personally find it acceptable.
You would pay more. Yeah, why not? Really?
That's interesting. I watched a documentary series.
Do you know Jamie Oliver? The British star chef.
The British chef. Yeah, that's right. He...
He had a lot of documentaries about trying to change food in the school systems and things like that.
Anyway, this was a very unique one that I watched.
It was about free range chickens versus chickens that were kept in cages.
Did you happen to catch that one? Yes, I did.
Yeah, it's interesting, right? So he had an audience in a dining room, right?
And he was cooking these eggs and he was telling them the stories of of how chickens can be treated poorly and how the free range chickens they live like a happier life and the quality of eggs is better and then he served the eggs to them and they agreed that the the audience agreed yes the free range eggs taste better and then he said but The free range eggs are more expensive than the eggs that come from the other chickens.
Which ones will you buy? And they said, well, feel kind of guilty about saying this, but we'd still buy the cheaper eggs.
So you asked about young people being impressed by the AI tech.
I don't see it, honestly. I don't see it.
I see families saying... Where can I save money here?
And yeah, of course, if I can do something that's great for the pigs or whatever along the way, that's wonderful.
But I also have to feed my kids and send them to school.
So, you know what I mean? With the scalability.
That means you can produce more, hopefully in the future for a lower cost.
So maybe we have to wait for that cost reduction.
Yeah, I think so too. We're maybe at the initial stage where the investment is so huge and for it to be recouped, then the businesses are, yeah, they're going to make this expensive because that's how much money they're already throwing into this.
But also... With the QR code thing, yeah, I see some people being more on the optimistic end of it.
But as a true Chinese consumer who's been around for some time, I've been through that organic vegetables wave in China, maybe seven, eight years ago.
I know this doesn't happen everywhere, but sometimes it happens just to bear that in mind.
What it used to be is like they place this organic vegetable sticker, a green sticker on the vegetable to prove that it's organic.
And I've seen the store assistant slap the organic sticker on just a regular vegetable. bunch of vegetables and immediately it costs like three to five times more expensive.
With the QR code, yeah, you can scan, go into the page, but who's going to guarantee to me that this is this particular pig and it's not Just one pig that has the same QR code and everybody can scan it and think, oh, this is real when in fact it's a fake one.
Yeah. So trust, establishing trust with your customer base is a big challenge there perhaps.
I think another challenge too, do you remember we talked about, gosh, maybe it was a month or so or maybe more ago on Roundtable about AI in the use of the medical industry and how AI would be able to detect early signs of particular diseases, cancer or other diseases we were talking about at the time.
But I remember one of the points we brought up was one of the potential problems was AI the doctors perhaps overly relying on the AI to the point where they couldn't understand what the AI was trying to figure out.
That was the argument you made. Right, right.
So how do you have a conversation with your patient when you can't even understand how the AI is working, right?
Like the ins and outs of what's going on.
I want to apply that same argument here, actually, because in the past with traditional farming, A pig farmer taking care of his or her pigs would know to recognize that cough, right?
Would know when to take care of the pigs and what they needed at what time of day.
But if all of this AI is implemented... That takes the skill away from the farmers, I think.
And there is potentially an over-reliance on the AI where you're simply blindly trusting it and not really understanding what it's doing.
I don't think it's a fair comparison, you know, A to A or what have you.
But I still think that argument applies here is that you can have that dependent relationship on the AI instead of really understanding what's going on with the animals.
I think that could potentially be a situation when if this is widely implemented in the industry.
But right now, I think actually, if we review the status quo, maybe we're kind of at exactly a more or less comfortable stage of development of industrialization for livestock, the livestock farming industry, because most of the farms haven't migrated to AI just yet, but now already we're seeing that there are pig farm buildings with air con, but just minus all the sensors.
And you've got the humans still taking up a large part of the heavy lifting manual labor, but where is this going?
And it seems like this is going into that more tech reliant direction.
And we see that looking across the industry, there's like rabbit farming, dairy cow farming, geese raising, even like raising crabs and shrimp and all that good stuff.
What smart animal farming practices That feels more promising to you here.
I like the cow example. Sorry to jump in, Yushan, but I quite like this one.
This is in Chongqing at a local dairy enterprise there.
So what they do is the cows wear electronic ear tags and they wear wireless collars. and then their health data is transmitted to a big data platform, and then after it's analyzed, then the platform automatically generates daily feed formula control plans for nutritionist reference.
By doing that, analyzing that data, they can precisely feed the cows.
And you think, what difference does that make?
Well, it results in a 10% increase in the yield of milk on the ranch and a 7% decrease in operating costs.
There's really no downside to any of that, right?
You get more milk from the cows and you save some money there and everybody's happy.
And me personally, I'm fascinated by the crab story because, well, we know that here in China there is one dish or maybe in China. asian many other asian countries too that there's one there's called the soft shell crabs and that's the little hairy shanghai ones those are the um you don't know what i'm talking about is it called mitten the mittens like you wear in winter time i don't know but they're they're a little hairy and they yeah they come in they steam them and bring them out so the mitten river crabs they're a delicacy the river ones in the uh autumn season Yeah, but you were saying you shed.
I almost forgot my point. The soft-shell crabs, they must be harvested within five minutes after molting.
So that is to maintain the peak taste and texture.
So sometimes it's really hard for humans to just quickly spot within five minutes.
So which crab is molting? So a Hong Kong entrepreneur, they adopt a crab caregiving robot.
We've been doing a lot of talks about elder care robots, but here is a crab caregiving robots that patrols 24 seven using cameras to monitor crabs behavior, just trying to find that prime time to harvest.
So that's something very, very interesting and, yeah, very smart as well.
Indeed. If pigs can live in AI-powered buildings with air con and smart diets, what else in our food system is ripe for a tech overhaul?
At the heart of this... issue is, well, the future of farming is no longer low-tech labor.
It's increasingly a game of algorithms, efficiency, and traceability.
But whether this shift is truly sustainable or just another phase of industrialization is something worth chewing on.
