Blockchain Chicken Farm

by Xiaowei Wang

  I wake up every day at 5:00 a.m. and read Pig Progress, a popular pork industry news source. There is a global pig panic and a pig lockdown in rural China, born out of biosecurity and the onset of African swine fever (ASF), a disease in pigs that causes hemorrhaging. The fatality rate is close to 100 percent, as pigs bleed out to their deaths. Headlines in my news feed declare a world on edge. While ASF has been in other countries, such as Russia and Belgium, this is the first time the fever has been reported in China, the world’s largest pork producer. The looming impacts are an unpleasant prospect for economists and politicians. Less pork available means higher food prices, and higher food prices means public discontent. Historical lessons abound: bread riots have been catalysts for the demise of empires, from the French Revolution to the Russian February Revolution. No one wants a pork riot.

  Pork dishes are a large part of Han Chinese cuisine. Pigs were domesticated in China as far back as 7000 B.C.E., and a 1929 anthropological survey showed that 70 percent of animal calorie intake in China was from pork. Within traditional Chinese medicine, food itself is medicine, and is crucial to the prevention of disease. Pork nourishes the blood and strengthens qi, the vital life force that flows through all living beings. Dishes are expected to be a balance of all five flavors, for medicinal benefit—sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, sour. Mao Zedong’s favorite dish, red braised pork, adheres to this flavor criteria, with the addition of extra chilies that signal the spiciness and revolutionary zeal of Mao’s native Hunan Province.

  While pork was once an occasional luxury, incomes and pork consumption are rising across China. This increased appetite is shifting geopolitical alliances and global trade. In 2013, the Henan Province–based WH Group bought the American pork producer Smithfield, making the WH Group the largest pork producer in the world. It expanded WH Group’s operations to a vast network of family farms and industrial operations outside of China. These industrial pig farms are an environmental headache for the communities that live around them, including states like North Carolina, which has launched legislative campaigns against Smithfield. In 2005, Brazil’s minister of foreign relations remarked on the rosy Brazil-China relationship as being part of the “reconfiguration of the world’s commercial and diplomatic geography.” Brazil is poised to be the world’s leader in soybean exports as swaths of the Amazon rain forest are deforested for soy farming. Eighty percent of the harvest ends up as pig feed, and China is currently the top buyer of Brazilian soy.

  Countries like the United States have wheat reserves as insurance against famine, and to control food prices. China is the only country in the world to have a pork reserve, consisting of millions of live pigs and uncountable pounds of frozen pork, hoarded from domestic and foreign sources. When the country experienced a 2008 food price surge, the government drew upon these pork reserves, which is how Smithfield pork ended up in China en masse.

  In Xiangyang village, a few hours outside of Guangzhou, I eat preserved pork for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ve been back in China for a few weeks now and pigs have become elusive. Unlike in previous years, when the aggressive snorting of pigs seemed to be present in most villages I walked through, autumn has turned into winter and pigs are nowhere to be found. Paranoia over ASF has led the local government to preventatively mass slaughter pigs that reside in small-scale family operations, reasoning that small farmers are unable to keep to biosecurity measures as tightly as industrial operations. I’m supposed to be researching pig farming in the countryside, but the animal is nowhere to be found.

  I annoy my host in Xiangyang with a slew of questions. “Do you raise pigs in the village? Where does this preserved pork come from? How much do you pay for pork? How do you raise pigs?” My host is incredulous at the simplemindedness of my questions. “Why would we raise pigs here?” he responds. “Pigs are so hard to raise well,” he tells me. “They’re smart animals and have a lot of needs. When you feed them, you have to buy grain, and then cook the grain, since they won’t eat it raw. They’re like humans. Even then, when you sell the pork, you’d never make back the money you invested in feed. Pork sells for cheap at markets these days; you can’t just go selling expensive pork and expect people to buy it.”

  He pauses. “We used to raise pigs in the village. They help our farming. You can use their waste for fertilizer. But then we finally got this paved road that connects the village to the rest of the county. People come around twice a week in cars, selling us pork, including the preserved pork you’re eating. It’s so much cheaper to buy pork than to raise your own. You’d be an idiot to raise your own.”

  Through friends, I manage to get in contact with just such an idiot named Li Jianhu, who runs an ecological pork CSA (community-supported agriculture) operation in Fujian. He’s plugged into the small-scale organic pork farming scene in southern China, so I’m hoping he can help me find a pig farm to visit. He says he’ll ask around, but no promises. Security is tight. African swine fever is serious.

  Jianhu explains that the virus is typically spread from snout-to-snout contact in wild boars, but has now infected domesticated pigs. If a pig does manage to survive ASF, it carries the disease for the rest of its life. The current disease vector of ASF in domesticated pigs is entirely human made.

  Instead of following the physical snout-to-snout models of disease transfer, which can be contained in one area, ASF is now spreading rapidly, jumping over several kilometers. It’s a resilient, contagious virus, and can even be spread through meat, including processed meat products like sausages, surviving UV light and extreme temperatures. Customs officials at borders are all on high alert after one Chinese tourist arriving in Thailand was found to have a lone ASF-contaminated sausage in a carry-on.

  Li Jianhu eventually gets back to me with no promising news. The situation is dire. He’s had to shut down his own pork CSA, given the newly implemented, highly restrictive policies for transporting pigs from farm to slaughterhouse. Even the Shanghai Meishan Pig Species Protection Farm, a tourist farm that relies on throngs of visitors to survive, is now closed.

  This is a big moment, Jianhu says. Prior to 2018, ASF had never entered China. The threat isn’t just to China’s pork supply but also to the world’s. China exports all sorts of pork products, from blood-clotting heparin to the protein powders in our smoothies, and all of these products are potential vehicles for ASF. As of 2018, ASF had never been reported within the United States.

  According to Jianhu, the first case of ASF in China was in a backyard pork operation, one of the many midsize pork farms with fewer than a hundred pigs. Ninety-eight percent of the pork farms in China have fewer than fifty animals, and these small to midsize farms account for about a third of pork production in China. These highly decentralized farms make government oversight difficult. There is also enormous pressure for these farms to keep up with the market price for pork, and to maintain steady production. The government was finding ASF a convenient excuse to eradicate these small farms, making way for centralized, industrial-scale operations.

  Industrial scale is where things were headed anyway, says Li Jianhu. “Over the past ten years, big capital has entered the picture.” Two-thirds of pork production is now concentrated in large corporations that are determined to do their patriotic duty: create China’s pork miracle. Through cost cutting and technological magic, China would produce enough cheap pork to meet demand.

  We created the ASF epidemic, says Jianhu, out of the quest for cheap pork. One of the ways to ensure cheap pork is to lower the cost of feeding pigs. Xiangyang village’s pigs were fed cooked grains and beans fit for human consumption. ASF has been transferred through industrial pig swill.

  Industrial pig swill is a finely tuned version of animal Soylent—a combination of GMO soybeans, grains, protein powders, and sometimes treated food waste. Treated food waste often contains pork, and the added protein powders are often derived from pigs. We are feeding pigs themselves.1 Many of us are unable to see this operation—for example, in th
e United States, there are “ag-gag” laws that make it illegal to even photograph industrial feeding operations. It’s in this opacity that industrial swill proliferates, keeping prices low. This swill is fully optimized: the optimal set of nutrients for a pig to grow to an appropriate size, to get to market in the optimal time. And so pigs unknowingly cannibalize each other, infecting and reinfecting their own kind.

  “Even if you do get to an industrial pig farming operation, what would you do there?” Jianhu asks. It’s not like I’d get to see any of the pigs close-up. In industrial pig farming, there is little contact between humans and pigs, and the pigs remain behind closed doors, viewable only on closed-circuit TV. Pigs have a fragile constitution. One pig farmer told me that pigs can get stressed and sick just from a minor change in their drinking water. Even under the best circumstances, without the threat of ASF, an industrial pig farm is more like an iPhone factory than a bucolic countryside haven. Each herd is watched and monitored on-screen for any signs of sickness or disease. When human intervention is required, people enter wearing disinfected hazmat suits and face masks, looking less like the blockchain chicken farmer Jiang and more like a worker inside a silicon chip factory.

  2.

  Right now, delicious, chef-lauded pork in China is being produced by NetEase, one of the world’s largest, most profitable internet gaming companies. Ding Lei, the founder of NetEase, was eating hot pot with friends and began to worry that the blood tofu, a traditional hot pot ingredient made of coagulated pigs’ blood, was fake. In this moment, Lei’s business plans turned from gaming to pig farming.

  Since 2009, in Lushan, Zhejiang, NetEase has been perfecting the art of raising pigs under Weiyang, its new agricultural products division.2 The farm in Lushan has the precision of an electronics factory and the feeling of the world’s most sterile, meticulous resort. On this farm, pigs live an optimized life, with an optimal amount of exercise and an optimal swill mix. They even listen to a soothing soundtrack, carefully designed for stress relief. This music is beneficial for us, as pork eaters. Stress before slaughter can alter a pig’s metabolism, increasing cortisol and resulting in what’s known in the industry as “DFD” (dark, firm, dry) meat. Weiyang pork is now available online and at special Weiyang retail stores scattered across China’s software capital, Hangzhou.

  More than a lone founder’s quest for pork purity or sheer novelty, NetEase’s foray into the food space is a clever business move. As Matilda mentioned to me in Shanghai, information about food is central to food safety. This makes industrialized farming, including modern pig farming, an information business, with a focus on scaling trust. NetEase Weiyang declares itself to be combining “internet thinking and modern agriculture.” And part of internet thinking involves farming at a scale and degree of precision possible in software—a level of control over every microscopic variable along the way, such as pig stress levels. Weiyang’s entire approach is crudely transparent—food, like engineers, can be a pipeline and sourcing issue, solved through increased vertical integration. NetEase has set up numerous massive online open courses (MOOCs) to create a population of skilled workers for recruiting directly into their company, addressing the existing shortage of skilled high-tech workers. Similarly, Weiyang skips the step of working with sources, instead creating its own source of high-quality pork, further eliminating any point of failure.

  3.

  On my way to visit the Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, I stop in the chaotic inland city of Guiyang, a tech boomtown that is building at a frenetic rate. Tencent, Alibaba, and Apple are all carving data centers into caves close to the city, hidden by subtropical trees. The entire city is an alien terrain—flat earth with mountains that seem to rise out of nowhere. Buildings hang off the sides of those mountains, with sky bridges connecting skyscrapers. Couriers on motorcycles weave around cars stuck in traffic. Drivers honk aggressively, with cigarettes dangling from their lips, windows rolled down. The scent of smog and smoke sticks to the back of my throat. Guiyang has a few nicknames. Locals call it mini Hong Kong for its vibrant, bacchanalian nightlife, but insist that Guiyang surpasses Hong Kong with its unique culture of constant, unabashed pleasure seeking—an ability to deal with worries tomorrow and enjoy life in the present.

  It’s evening and the sky is a dark orange as city lights cast a ghoulish veil in the haze of pollution. I leave the tiny efficiency studio I’m staying at, on the fortieth floor of a high-rise apartment building. The building brims with voices, with electronic dance music, with the sounds of living. The elevator stops at nearly every floor, a voyeuristic descent. Floor thirty-eight is a high-end hair salon, with two young women waiting in satin robes, tapping away at their cell phones. Floor thirty-five is dark, empty, a construction site filled with debris, old appliances, and a metal cot. A migrant worker dressed in dusty camouflage gets on the elevator, holding an empty plastic pail and a towel; he’s likely sleeping on this floor during his construction-work stint. Floor thirty-three is a karaoke (KTV) club, illuminated pink with two women clad in white tops and denim miniskirts at reception. Floor thirteen is residential. A child drives onto the elevator in a red toy Mercedes, accompanied by his mother, a woman with bleached-blond hair. Each floor is mesmerizing, an intimate map of complicated lives, shaped by the uneven contours of this mountainous city.

  When the elevator gets to the lobby, I walk through a set of glass doors past a sleeping security guard. Pig life is still on my mind. I wonder: Can life be optimized? And if it can, what would you even optimize for?

  An entire industry of scientists, swine technicians, genetic testing companies, educational institutions, and industrial-farm managers exist in order to optimize porcine life. Corporations like the Pig Improvement Company harness computational genetics and cutting-edge biology to design pigs specifically for industrial farming. Increased agricultural automation has led to pigs becoming physically standardized, much like our fruits and vegetables. As with an assembly line in a factory, scaling from producing one hundred pigs to a hundred thousand means requiring parts to be the same size and type, interchangeable. Before the advent of industrial agriculture in China, farmers raised hundreds of pig breeds of different sizes and attributes. These pigs were adapted to local climates and diseases, providing a receptacle for leftovers and generating rich fertilizer for fields.

  Industrial pig farming uses only a few breeds, such as the highly popular hybrid DLY (a cross between Duroc, Landrace, and Yorkshire). Even the unwanted attributes of these pigs are slowly being refined, edited out—physical traits like tails, which are a nuisance in transport, since in crowded conditions stressed piglets will bite each other’s tails off. Combined with genetic control, automatic feeder and water-dispenser systems, and strict exercise times, pigs are farmed to precise size.

  The hubris of optimizing life assumes levers of control: you can optimize for something if you think you know the outcome, if you’ve convinced yourself that you have managed to quantify all the variables. But in an uncertain, irrational world, nothing is guaranteed. The systems of industrial agriculture constantly seek to eliminate any uncertainty. For porcine life, levers of control exist from the small scale of pig DNA to the large infrastructural systems of slaughterhouses designed to decrease stress (and improve the texture of pork). As ASF unfolds in China, it’s clear that optimization has wrought a complex system with consequences humans could never have imagined in our precise models and calculations. These consequences expose that sense of control as a total delusion. Yet the quest for optimization continues.

  Our own lives are being threatened by this hubristic optimization process. The appearance of new human diseases such as bird flu and other novel influenzas like COVID-19—zoonotic diseases that cross from animal to human—coincide with our modern era of optimizing life, of industrialized agriculture and subsequent habitat loss. The evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace has shown how this highly optimized, industrial farming of meat is leading to the unchecked creation of devastating
new pathogens. For multinational agribusinesses and the governments that support them, “it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” A 2015 paper on zoonotic disease worriedly proclaims that 60 percent of all emerging diseases are now zoonotic, and 80 percent of new pathogens come from the top pork-producing countries—places like China.3 With meat consumption growing worldwide, we might just eat enough to also snuff ourselves out.

  Outside the apartment building in Guiyang, people are just starting to eat their second dinner at 10:00 p.m., a habit that I am told is intrinsic to hard-partying Guiyang. It’s technically a Tuesday, but in Guiyang, every night feels like a Friday.

  Street vendors and informal food stalls have sprung up along sidewalks, illuminated by glowing signs and incandescent bulbs drooping from extension cords. One vendor brings out bowls of steaming rice noodles in a salty broth, with trails of spicy red oil and ground pork, garnished with pickles and peanuts. Revelers sit on tiny stools surrounding low plastic tables. Trash piles into the storm drains in the street, a mess of skewers, noodles, and hot pot remnants. Dozens of empty bottles sit next to one table, as a group of middle-aged men slurp noodles and drink beer out of small, thin-walled plastic cups. They toast each other, they give toasts to good health. They drunkenly toast this evening, a precious sliver of time together, under the weight of their responsibilities and hardships. “At our age, it isn’t easy to find time to be with each other, and we’ve all been through a lot to be here today,” one of them says, voice slurring with emotion. I sit, eating alone. After traveling by myself for days on end, I watch with a tinge of jealousy as they relish this evening. A visceral glow of life surrounds them. In this glow, the word “commitment” surfaces. A commitment to the path of living as life unfolds, no matter how it transforms. A desire to keep living, not against but with the specter of frailty, failure, and death. This commitment is a naked pleasure that exists under the ever-shifting, open space of change, palpable against the hungry, narrow world of optimization. It would be impossible to optimize life for these kinds of joy. Such pleasure cannot exist in a fully optimized world.