Matthew
This is Feeding 1 in 6, presented by Table, I’m Matthew Kessler and today we’ve got a bonus episode, a sort of part 2 to the Vertical Pork episode. A conversation with Ray Chan.
Ray
My name is Ray Chan. I'm a human geographer and Wellcome trust research fellow based at the Royal Agricultural University in the UK. For the past several years, I have been conducting ethnographical research inside China's corporate farms, digital livestock technology companies, and animal health sectors.
Matthew
How did you originally get into this topic?
Ray
Well, I grew up in a pig farming family in Hong Kong then I get interested in pig farming research. In China, pig industry has undergone a profound transformation over the past three decades.
Matthew
We talked about this in the pork episode. With an enormous increase in animal protein demand, and growing risks from infectious diseases like African Swine Fever, China has been investing heavily in biosecurity, which -
Ray
- has pushed the industry to become more larger, more intensive, and more technologically advanced system to manage disease, animal waste and feed and resources.
Because of this, I found that it is quite interesting to ask the question, how do this biosecure system make life safer and for whom and at what cost? So this is, draw me to pay attention on the Chinese pig industry.
Matthew (02:18.487)
While making this series on China's food system this past year, I've been paying a lot of attention to statistics. China, a single country, produces and eats half the world's pork, grows a third of the world's rice, and raises a third of the world's fish. But once you get past those big bold numbers, you might start to wonder: are these big numbers the things that matter the most?
Because under that, there's something worth paying attention to that's much harder to count. And that's the health of the food system. The health of the farm animals, the laborers, the eaters, and the communities and ecosystems surrounding food production.
And there's a framework that tries to hold all of this together. It’s called One Health, the idea that animal health, human health, and environmental health are not separate problems to be managed by separate agencies, but a single interconnected system.
In this conversation, I want to use this lens to dive into the evolution of livestock systems in China and expand on what the series only briefly touched on. So whether industrial systems are better suited to deal with infectious disease outbreaks, the gaps between biosecurity protocols on paper versus what actually happens on the ground, and what a genuinely healthier livestock system might look like.
Let’s start with disease transmission 101. Before we get into the specifics of China, can you give us a picture of the different pathways of how disease enters livestock farms?
Ray
Yeah, this is a very important question. Disease can enter livestock farm in many different ways. However, there are four major pathways through which pathogens most commonly enter a farm.
Matthew
So the first vector, there’s people, like workers. Second, through animals, which includes both farm animals or wild animals. Third, is on vehicles and equipment. And fourth, contaminated farm inputs - like feed ingredients or even the water.
Ray
In practice, human movement and vehicle movement are often the most common and difficult risk to control because they connect multiple sites together. For example, a worker who has recently visited a wet market or a pork butchery could unknowingly carry pathogens back to the farm. Likewise, a vehicle that has transported sick animals or visited a slaughterhouse, if not properly cleaned and disinfected, can bring virus and bacteria onto the farm.
Matthew
So we talked about this some in the pork episode, and knowing that African swine fever can spread in all those ways, was it surprising to you or did it seem the logical choice that China responded with the biosecurity protocols that it did, which was moving toward these larger, more contained, more controlled farming systems?
Ray
In 2018 the outbreak of African Swine Fever is a watershed. So before African Swine fever biosecurity practice was loose and unsound. However, after African swine fever, this practice is banned.
Maybe give you some example. In many corporate farms, workers must shower before entering production areas, change clothing multiple times, undergo PCR testing and follow strict movement protocols. Farms have become increasingly enclose environment with high walls, quarantine facility, separate transport route, dedicated elevator to separate human and animal flow within the farm and highly standardized operating procedures have been enforced.
What we are seeing is not simply disease prevention. We are seeing the emergence, a new form of governance in which both humans and animals are managed through biosecurity system.
Matthew
In the pork episode - we went into more details about how African Swine Fever didn’t just improve biosecurity outcomes, but how it accelerated a massive restructuring of China’s pig industry. Fewer operators and larger operations. Ray Chan here adds some more details at the ground level. His research specifically looks at the human and animal lives inside these systems.
Ray
Based on my fieldwork observations, I experienced firsthand how workers live and work. Their daily life are shaped by strict disease prevention measures. Workers are required to consume disinfected food, undergo whole-body disinfection showers, sometimes up to four times a day, and submit to daily fingernail inspections.
Failure to comply with standard operating procedures can result in monetary penalties. In many farms, milk products are prohibited because they are considered potential disease risk.
Matthew
Did you - sorry - I just want to make sure I heard this right. Did you say they're monitoring the type of food that the workers are eating?
Ray
Yes, all the food need to be using disinfectant to disinfect. Vegetables, noodles, rice, so all the food enter the corporate pig farm need to be disinfected to make sure there are no virus and bacteria.
Matthew
This is a high degree of security. Almost all the interviews I conducted for this series, it became very clear that biosecurity was the most important principle driving the evolution of China's livestock systems, especially its pork production. Biosecurity is a word that I think means different things to different people.
Can you just talk about what is the narrow understanding of what that means? And then maybe zoom out a little bit. What is the wider understanding of what biosecurity is?
Ray
Yeah. in a narrow sense. Biosecurity means preventing disease from entering or leaving a farm through measures such as disinfection, quarantine, surveillance, and physical barriers like building a high wall.
In the broader sense, biosecurity is about deciding which forms of life are protected, which risks are prioritized, and how people and animals are expected to behave. During my field work in corporate pig farms, I found that biosecurity was not just a technical term, it shaped workers' daily routines, movement, social relationships and even their senses of responsibility towards animals. Therefore, biosecurity is not only about controlling pathogens, it is also a way of governing people and animals.
Matthew
This in part explains the shift to larger farms. It aligns with a government predilection for having more control, which is more difficult to achieve when you have many dispersed smaller farms. What I found interesting in Ray’s research is that these biosecurity protocols show up in different ways in the large corporate farms and the smallholder farms.
Ray
For corporate producers they have standard operation, covering everything from showering procedures to carcass disposal. Workers can face disciplinary action if they fail to comply.
For small farms, they may not have the resources to set up a biosecurity system like the large corporate pig farm does. They may simply change the clothing and set up a disinfectant pool, often a shallow tray with capillary mat for wheels or a physical dip for boots as a simple standard biosecurity barrier used at farm entrance.
Matthew
Ray’s research also explores this gap, between biosecurity protocols on paper and everyday practices, or between desired intention and actual result.
Ray
One thing I observed was a farm that had invested heavily in modern technologies, like the digital technologies, like AI, biosensor robots. However, basic biosecurity infrastructure was missing.
Internet failure disrupted communication and then the robot could not really monitor the pigs. Just like this, you know, the basic infrastructure collapse, it can affect the whole system.
Workers receive limited training and even routine procedures could be misunderstood. So while basically protocol looks impressive on paper, implementation depends on mundane things such as maintenance, training and management capacity. Even the internet, that basic need. This reminds us that biosecurity is never simply a technical system, it depends on people making it work.
Matthew
In the series we also talked about how genetically uniform animals packed together in confined spaces can help create conditions for new diseases to emerge. What we didn’t talk about was this other vulnerability, the gap between how these systems are theoretically set up to control biosecurity risk and how they’re implemented.
I wanted to get Ray’s thoughts on the practical impacts of this wide adoption of precision technologies to keep diseases out of China’s pork production.
Ray
Digital technology, in a certain extent, by function is helpful. Like sensors can monitor temperatures and behaviors. Cameras can detect abnormalities, automated feeding systems can optimize nutrition, smart environmental control systems can regulate ventilation and temperature. Yeah, by function it could be helpful.
Matthew
It’s also worth emphasizing that digital technologies don’t simply replace labor. It’s not just add a robot to replace a worker or a worker task. Instead these technologies redistribute labor.
Ray
But what I see when we look at the labor and social relationship, when this digital technologies are introduced to this system is that digital technology is producing both what I call upskilling and de-skilling effect on the farm.
On the upskilling side, workers need to learn how to use digital devices to collect, upload, download, and interpret data. We are also seeing the emergence of entirely new jobs on farms, particularly in corporate pig farm, including data analyst, maintenance engineer, platform coordinator, AI technician, and digital support staff.
At the same time there can be this deskilling effect for the industry. As you know, traditionally careful observation animal, listening to them, noticing subtle behavioral change, and physical assessing their health. Increasingly, however, some workers rely on digital systems to perform these tasks. For instance, workers may wait for cough detection software or temperature sensor to flag potential health problems, rather than identify aspects through their own sensory and practical knowledge.
This raise important question about whether digitalization is gradually displacing some of the embodied skills that have historically been central to animal care. So for me, technology does not only does not eliminate the disease risk. The key question is not whether technology works or not, but what but what kinds of knowledge and relationship it creates or displace.
Matthew
I was really struck in the series by the quote that Ron Lane said:
Ron
You know all these farms are getting all this modern technology, but they may lose their practical skill. Because you still have to go in, you still have to know a little bit about the pig industry in order to make it work. You can't just look on a machine and say okay, "It says it's okay, but it's been dead for three days." You have to be cognizant of what goes on.
Matthew
I'd like to talk more about antimicrobial resistance, which I know is a field that you've followed closely and we in the series barely touched at all. So this is a good opportunity to correct that. Can you maybe start just with what is AMR antimicrobial resistance and how does it affect human and animal health?
Ray
Antimicrobial resistance happens when germs like bacteria, virus and fungi change over time and stop responding to the medicine designed to kill them. This makes medical procedures much harder to perform safely.
And China faced a lot of challenges because of its enormous livestock sector and historically high antibiotic use in both medicine and agriculture. Over the last decade China has some changes like introduced some major reforms including restrictions on antibiotic use in hospitals and then the ban on growth promoting antibiotics in animal feed in 2020.
These changes have reduced some forms of misuse, but what we observe, antimicrobial resistance remains a major challenge because resistant bacteria continue to evolve and circulate between animals and humans and environment in China.
Matthew
I mean this is a very familiar story for me in the United States with our livestock systems where we've seen the challenges with high uses of using these antibiotics. It's effective at keeping the animals alive, but it also then kind of builds an input treadmill where you need to kind of continue to put more into the animal tol maintain its status.
And I know there's been also in the United States, there's been some companies and industries, like I think Tyson Foods with Poultry have completely eliminated their antibiotic use.
Fact-checking myself here. In 2023, Tyson removed it’s “no antibiotic ever” label and now uses limited amount.
Then there's this recognition of the environmental and health consequences of the overuse and there's been policy reforms and genuine efforts for reduction.
I wonder how you would forecast the coming decade with antimicrobial resistance. Do you think it's something that will continue to trend down, or how do you think China's dealing with it?
Ray
I think it's a very tough pathway for China to reduce antimicrobial use in the current intensive production system. And particularly it depends on the stages in the supply chain. For pig breeding farm or sow breeding farm, there I can see there's some positive sign of reducing use of antibiotics.
However, for the fattening farms, even though there's a ban on growth promoting antibiotics in animal feed in China in 2020, what I observed is they are a cocktail mix of antibiotic use in the fattening farms. So when we look at the whole supply chain, there are some stages, production stages are doing better than the others. And then China tried to move the industry from prophylactic use of antibiotic to training more veterinary knowledge, training with the idea about to prevent antimicrobial resistance. They are highly promoted in the Chinese veterinary school at the moment. So I can see some positive signs. However, the pathway is still a long way to go and still lots of challenges.
Matthew
I open this with this one health framing. I wonder if you think that is practiced or adopted as a frame for dealing with the various risks that the system produces?
Ray
So for the one health concept, I think in China is still very new to them, particularly for the pig farming industry. We try to engage with the industry by introducing this in the Liman Pig Conference, but one of the biggest pig conferences in China. Some researchers try to introduce this concept to the pig corporate owners. However I think the industry is more focused on human needs like cheap pork supply for the Chinese populations, but lesser concern about pig welfare and also the environmental concern like pig waste pollution in the environment, air pollution still a long way to fulfill what the One Health concept bring us for.
So I think we define health more broadly than disease prevention because the one health concept maybe they more focus on disease prevention. Then a healthier livestock system would need to balance biosecurity with animal welfare, worker welfare, environmental sustainability and rural livelihood.
I think disease prevention is important from the industry perspective. But health cannot simply mean building larger and more enclosed systems. It also requires attention to animal density, working conditions, antimicrobial stewardship, environmental impact and also the survival of smaller producers.
I think one lesson from my research is that One Health should not be understood just a technical term. It is also a social and political question about what kind of agricultural future we want to build, can we consider more their welfare and also the one the fundline worker welfare can we consider in this One Health agenda.
Matthew
So if you were advising the Chinese government on what a genuinely healthier livestock system would be, is this what you would say?
Ray
Yeah, that's right. I think more than that, like the most important question is not how we produce more pork, but how we produce pork in a way that are healthier for animals, workers, community, and ecosystems.
One thing we often forget is that biosecurity is experienced by people. During my fieldwork I always think that workers spend weeks or months inside the farms, they repeatedly shower, changing clothing, underwent testing, the PCR test, and follow strict movement controls. I can see that many workers accept these kind of measures because they want to protect the animal and secure their livelihoods, but there are also lots of hidden social costs associated with this kind of intensive biosecurity system.
Matthew
I’m going to share a few closing thoughts on the hidden costs of biosecurity and what comes next.
It's not every day that someone tells you, plainly, the way we produce food is a decision about which lives get protected. About what behavior is expected from the people and animals who are a part of that system.
This dynamic obviously isn’t unique to China's food system. It's just rarely put in such stark relief as it is in this example.
Ray Chan walked us through a day in the life of a pig farm worker – putting your hands out for fingernail inspections, taking four showers a day, PCR testing, sitting down for meals with disinfected food. All of this in service of keeping the pigs safe.
The workers, the inspectors in these systems, could be the farmworkers of the future. Ones with degrees in computer science, data analysts, software managers. Their task: to create the most biosecure system optimized for efficiency.
I’m spending some time thinking about this future, because it seems the most likely. As we’ve been discussing in these livestock episodes, this combination of technological advancements, industry consolidation and biosecurity investment has raised the bar for who can farm and compete in this new landscape.
It’s not that hard to imagine in 2050 that half of global pork moves through a handful of companies, with these vertical pork systems becoming more widespread.
Ray told me there are plans to build a hog high rise in Hong Kong. His family isn’t sure if they’ll continue producing pork in the next 5 years.
I’m wondering, what, if anything, might meaningfully change that trajectory? Another disease outbreak like African Swine Fever, a public reckoning with the conditions of these systems, a breakthrough in cultivated meat?
Will some external or even internal event start to crack the walls and expose the system’s vulnerabilities, or will we keep fortifying the pillars, the way we've done at every turn so far, with better technology and tighter policy, staying one step ahead of the cracks rather than addressing what's causing them?
Matthew
Thanks for listening and thanks to Ray Chan, Wellcome research fellow and human geographer at Royal Agricultural University. Links to his research and a transcript can be found in our shownotes. As always, we welcome your thoughts on the episode and the series. Write us or send a voice memo to podcast@tabledebates.org
This is our final bonus episode, for now, of Feeding 1 in 6. This has been a wonderful collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust. A huge thanks to the funders and people who made this series possible.
This episode was edited, hosted and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you again soon on the Feed podcast.