From Ningxia to the Yangtze River Delta: The "long journey" and industrial upgrading of Jingyuan scalpers

In the evening, a citizen in the Yangtze River Delta opened a product purchased on an online fresh food platform. Inside was a piece of fresh beef with a red color. Consumers may not know that less than 30 hours ago, it was still in the workshop at the foot of Liupan Mountain in Ningxia.

After slaughtering and processing, this piece of meat traveled across half of China and finally made it to the dinner of families in the Yangtze River Delta.

In recent years, beef has gradually become an important role on the dining table of Chinese residents, and the consumer market's demand for mid-to-high-end beef continues to grow. The expansion of diversified sales channels has also brought some regional brands into the public eye.

Recently, the reporter followed the "Vibrant China Research Tour" interview team to the eastern foothills of Liupan Mountain in Ningxia, and conducted on-site research on how local leading enterprises operate from breeding, slaughtering and processing, to cold chain transportation, expanding sales, and helping farmers increase income.

A "long journey" of beef

At the end of September, the weather is cool in Jingyuan County, Guyuan City, at the eastern foot of Liupan Mountain in Ningxia. This is a national key ecological functional area with landscapes such as Liangdian Gorge, Laolongtan, and Rouge Gorge. It has been awarded the title of "China's Most Beautiful Ecological Leisure Tourism County".

In addition to the natural scenery, another well-known sign here is the "Jingyuan Yellow Ox". Public information shows that Jingyuan County has attached great importance to the development of animal husbandry since ancient times. As early as the Zhou Dynasty and the Spring and Autumn Period, there were already herds of cattle and horses. The cattle raised were said to "drink mineral water every day and eat Chinese herbal medicine every day." Local farmers have accumulated rich breeding experience.

Today, as residents' beef consumption is increasing day by day, these regional beef categories are "trekking" to the north and south of the country.

"The cattle that are slaughtered every day are deacidified and entered into the workshop for segmentation. One cow is divided into 16 and 32 parts. 500 grams of beef tendon meat is just enough for a family to eat for one meal. The finished product will be sent to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing and other cities." said Guo Fangfang, general manager of Yuanniu (Ningxia) Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Technology Co., Ltd.

With the help of cold chain freshness locking technology, beef can be delivered from Ningxia to the dining tables of residents in many places across the country in less than 30 hours.

Yuanniu (Ningxia) Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Technology Co., Ltd. was established in 2021. It is a modern beef enterprise integrating breeding, slaughtering and processing, cold chain transportation, cold fresh sales, catering and tourism. At the Yuanniu intensive processing base, the reporter saw that it has multiple functional blocks such as cold fresh slaughtering, advanced cutting, cooked food processing, and catering tasting.

Since it was officially put into operation in 2023, the company's turnover has achieved a "triple jump."

According to detailed information disclosed by the company, the company will build a standardized slaughtering and processing base and ecological pasture in 2023, with an annual turnover of 8.75 million yuan. In 2024, the slaughtering, segmentation and cold chain system will be improved, the slaughter volume will increase significantly, and the annual turnover will be 21.79 million yuan; in 2025, the slaughter volume will be 6,006 heads, and the turnover will exceed 40 million yuan, nearly doubling the previous year.

As a young local "leading" company, how does Yuanniu Agriculture and Animal Husbandry expand sales channels and achieve revenue growth?

Guo Fangfang said that the company’s sales and business development channels have many aspects. The first is purchase orders from large central state-owned enterprises; the second is offline sales channels, with cooperative stores in 12 cities across the country, including beef and mutton stores, chain supermarkets, etc.; the third is online e-commerce platform sales, and a live broadcast team has been established; the fourth is the launch of its own catering, opening a hot pot restaurant in Yinchuan, etc.

Of course, what consumers value most is the quality of beef. In this regard, Guo Fangfang said that Jingyuan yellow beef is a national geographical indication product. It contains a variety of beneficial trace elements, with a lean meat rate of 80% to 85% and a clean meat rate of more than 43%. In terms of safety, standardized feeding, the growth of each cattle can be indexed, and local fattening and slaughtering can reduce infectious diseases caused by cross-regional transportation.

In addition, the company has carried out technical cooperation with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Ningxia Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Ningxia University, etc., and experts have provided guidance on breeding, product research and development, etc., and have successively developed categories such as low-temperature fresh beef and heat-shrunk chilled beef. In terms of logistics, the quality of beef remains stable after long-distance transportation, and the best fresh-locking temperature has been developed and tested to deliver fresh meat to consumers' tables.

From free-range farming by farmers to standardization

For a long time, the deep-seated structural contradiction of my country's beef industry is that small-scale farmers have been mainly free-range farmers for a long time. The degree of intensification is low, the reproduction efficiency is not high, and the feed conversion rate is low, which has a certain impact on beef production and market supply and demand.

For the land of Jingyuan, there is no shortage of farmers raising cattle. It can even be said that "every household raises cattle." However, before the emergence of more mature "chain owner" companies, farmers had inconsistent breeding standards and weak bargaining power when selling. Guo Fangfang also mentioned that in the past, local farmers had relatively limited information, and "cattle dealers" controlled the purchase price, squeezing farmers' income.

The model of Yuanniu farming and animal husbandry is that on the one hand, it has its own ecological pasture, which serves as a demonstration of standardized breeding and the basis for high-end cattle sources. On the other hand, we have established cooperative relationships with breeding cooperatives and surrounding farmers, and the cattle sold for slaughter are purchased by Yuanniu according to the order. For some farmers, if they are short of funds, they can also entrust the cattle to enterprises and raise them uniformly according to standards.

In terms of purchase price, the cow is purchased from farmers at a price of 1 yuan per catty higher than the market price. A professional team comes to the door, cutting out the middlemen and giving the profits directly to farmers. With free transportation and slaughter, one cow can help farmers increase their income by 2,000 to 3,000 yuan. "Last year, more than 50 cattle were sold to Yuanniu Company, earning more than 100,000 yuan," said a farmer.

The reporter saw at a local breeding farm that the cattle here have a QR code, which the farmer said is "equivalent to the cattle's exclusive ID card", recording the cattle's birth time, vaccination records, epidemic prevention information, disease records and other files. The acquiring company can directly retrieve all the information in the QR code to ensure the quality and safety of beef from the source.

Under the "enterprise + cooperative + base (farmer)" model, in 2025, Yuanniu Agriculture and Animal Husbandry purchased a total of 2,872 live cattle from farmers, benefiting 252 farmers, with an average income increase of 20,000 yuan; absorbing 47 long-term workers and more than 150 temporary workers. In the first half of 2026, the company will serve more than 4,000 farmers, and the coverage of industrial radiation will continue to expand.

Looking at Jingyuan County as a whole, the number of beef cattle raised in the county will reach 115,000 in 2025, and the output value of the entire industry chain will exceed 1 billion yuan. Relying on the two leading beef cattle enterprises, Yuanniu and Jingshuiyuan, the local area has linked up with 230 breeding cooperatives and 10 beef intensive processing enterprises, opening up a complete link from the cattle shed to the dining table, and the average annual income of 6,800 breeding households has increased by 15,000 yuan.

It is worth noting that the current beef industry has entered an upward window of "resonance between production capacity cycles and policy drives".

Industry organizations said that the beef import quota management policy that will be implemented at the end of 2025 has weakened the price competitiveness of imported beef and gained more market space for domestic beef. Coupled with the continued depletion of domestic fertile cow stocks, it is expected that beef prices will enter a rising channel that resonates with the "capacity cycle" and "policy-driven" from 2026 to 2027.

According to monitoring by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, in the second week of September, the national beef price was 75.73 yuan per kilogram, up 0.5% month-on-month, 7.2% year-on-year, and 6.1% higher than the beginning of the year. After September, as the temperature drops and holidays such as the Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, and New Year's Day arrive intensively, the demand for beef and other meat products is concentrated, which is expected to form the strongest consumption peak in the year.

For local brands such as Yuanniu Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, in order to achieve the goal of moving from "going out" to "standing firmly" and from "regional brand" to "national brand", it is necessary to further enhance the development of standardization, scale, branding and the development of the entire industry chain.