Sunday, May 15

Ni-hao (hello) from China, 

After a full night of rest in our new hotel in Xi'an, we set out for the Northwest University Beef Farm.  They are partnered Kingbull, which was the first cattle breeding company in China.  This farm has 10,000 beef cattle housed in twenty barns.   The company emphasizes in four different areas: reproduction, engineering, nutrition, and training of producers.  The company has crossed Black Angus and a local red breed, then mated the offspring to a waygu.   They produce a high quality marbling beef which is expensive and also a lower quality that sell more locally.  Retail beef from a Kingbull can be scanned and traced back to the source.  The Chinese like beef, but are not particular on the specific palatability. The manure is made into fertilizer that is then used on fields to improve growth.  In the company's cow/calf operation which is a few miles away, they do not synchronize the estrous cycles of the cattle and the weaning weights are lower than weaning weights in the United States.  The operation does not have an established EPD (estimated progeny difference) system to select for desired traits.  They have a total of 8,000 beef cows with the majority of them the local yellow breed and a few Waygu.  They are all dry-lotted on solid brick flooring, and body confirmation is sure different than our US cattle.  After lunch at the Northwest Agricultural & Forestry University (40,000 students), we made a quick stop at a local farm equipment dealership.  While A LOT smaller than farm equipment in the US, the designs were similar.

Our next stop, we visited the Shaanxi Provencal Dairy Cattle Center, which was home to 4,000 dairy cattle.  The dairy farm was very modernized with a 60-cow milking carousel.  They set a high desire on making the farm presentable to those who visit.  The farm milked the cows three times a day and produced a total 45 tons of milk per day.  Each cow produced 30 kg (66 pounds) per day.  The farm receives about 4.1 yuan/kilogram (33 cents/pound), which is substantially higher than the United States.  Milk is more expensive because they have to import most of their feed from the United States.  They feed their cattle a mixture of silage, haylage, sugar cane, and cotton seed.  It is illegal for them to feed blood meal to cattle. While observing their feed storage facilities, many of the guys jumped in to help unload sugar cane from a truck giving a few of the workers a break. 

Sunshine Lidu Grand Theater was the next stop on our destination.  Xi'an is an ancient capital of China, so it is most famous for its dumpling dinners.  Dumpling dinners are famous because the wife of the emperor of the Tang Dynasty loved dumplings, so he created numerous different kinds.  The theater served many different kinds of dumplings.  The dumplings were shaped to represent the meat that it was made of.  The Tang Dynasty was a time of political and economic prosperity in China, dances during this period was very colorful and cultural to represent this history.  In total, there were nine different dances to represent this time.   

The rest of the night was left to explore the streets and local life of Xi'an.

Devin and Tyler