Tri-State Neighbor: South Dakota Farm Newspaper

The opportunity to travel, especially to China, for one South Dakota State University student was one too tempting to turn down.

Jared Knock, a senior animal science major from Willow Lake, S.D., learned about the chance to go to China from SDSU Animal and Range Sciences department head Bob Thaler and meat science professor Duane Wulf. Thaler, who had gone to Kansas State University for his doctorate, met a fellow student from China who is now at China Agriculture University. Both had wanted to start an exchange program for years and this summer they got their chance.

“I didn’t specifically seek out going to China like it was something I wanted to do. It just came up as an opportunity,” Knock said. “It was something regardless if I wanted to go or not, it was just such a perfect opportunity. I really couldn’t turn it down.”

Besides, Knock was interested in what was changing in China economically and politically.

“I mean now there’s nothing too serious holding me back for just a few months, so if I’m ever going to go it should be now,” he said. “I wanted to get over there and see what all the hype was about and what everyone was so excited about why China was going to be so important in the next few years economically and politically.”

Knock left for Beijing, China, June 23 and returned the end of October. Most of his time was spent in Beijing at China Agriculture University’s China Beef Research Center. Knock says the center is a new concept at the university that was set up specifically to research ways to develop the beef industry into a more modern one in China.

Knock’s professor and director of the center, Dr. Meng, kept him pretty busy with various projects that took him all over the country and Mongolia.

“I spent quite a bit of time at one beef packing plant in southern Beijing looking at the procedures and taking some real rough carcass data,” he said. “I traveled a lot. I got to see a lot of things. Whenever my professor went somewhere I always got to come with.”

Besides traveling the country, Knock also gave presentations and twice a week he taught a conversational English class where most of his lectures were based on beef cattle.

Knock says the packing plants in China do most everything like the United States, but have a few holes in their systems. Many of the plants he visited had automatic carcass splitters, automatic hide pullers and other high-tech devices, but little pieces of things were missing to make the rest of the procedures void.

“The one plant I worked with most of the time had most of the modern equipment you could ask for. It was really pretty hygienic and they kept things pretty clean and yet there was not hot water in the whole plant,” he said.

While these packing plants have the latest technology, most are running between 5 percent and 20 percent capacity. The only one that was running above 70 percent capacity was the largest packing plant in China that supplies most of the meat for McDonald’s in China.

Most of China’s meat - 80 percent to 90 percent - reaches the consumer on a wet market basis where nothing is ever inspected or refrigerated.

“Everything is just slaughtered in someone’s backyard and then put out on the street and sold, and they really prefer that,” Knock said. “They’re not really willing to pay for a higher-quality product yet. It’s not a big issue to them.”

China has a grading system but no packing plant uses it. Most plants use an “SAB” system that is based on weight that they use only for tenderloins. The largest plant uses a pH meter on all carcasses to determine dark cutters, but Knock says their thresholds are off so it is not doing them any good.

“They want a grading system. I think they need a health inspection system (first). I don’t think they need to be grading for quality, they need to be grading for hygiene,” Knock said. “They do (inspect hygiene), but 89 percent of it is slaughtered in these backyard deals so there’s nothing there. … They have a system but it’s not anything we would deem acceptable by any means.”

The modern packing plants are buying the best cattle, the ones, Knock says, that have been fed somewhat of a concentrate diet and tried to be harvested at a young age. Knock estimates that 30 percent of the cattle are under 24 months old, 30 percent are between 24 months and 30 months, and the rest were over 36 months old. Nearly all slaughter cattle - 95 percent - are bulls. They do not castrate and it is considered taboo to slaughter heifers and cows.

Knock believes if the Chinese want to improve their beef quality they do not need to look at breeds or genetics. Corn in China is over $4 a bushel and most are not willing to pay that much.

“You’ve got to find some other way to increase quality without that. There’s some things you could do to get that - castrate, slaughter at a younger age,” he said. “They’re kind of hard to put into a system. I think they have other things on their plate before they can do that.”

However, maybe China does not need that kind of grading system. Knock reports they eat meat a lot differently than most Americans. The first difference is in size. They do not eat meat in big chunks, like steaks, like Americans do, so tenderness is not as important to them.

The second difference is cooking methods and when they eat their meat. Most of the people eat their meat pre-rigor because most of it has only been butchered for a couple of hours before it gets cooked.

“They cut things in extremely small strips. They cook it for a long time in moist heat. So is quality that important?” Knock said.

According to data from 1999 that Knock found while in China, the majority of herds - 44 percent - consist of one cow. In 1999, China had 100 million head of cattle.

About 600 million to 800 million people in the country live on farms. The government owns all the land so farmers must rent it from the government. Those living on farms get one mu per person. A mu is one-seventeenth of an acre. A family of six would get almost an acre to make a living on.

Farmers cannot expand in China since they cannot own land. Knock questions what if any progressive techniques would help them grow their agriculture.

“For things to modernize to free people up off the land, they have to increase the scale of production,” Knock said. “To ever get these people out of poverty, they’ve got to find some way to get more people off the farm and give the people that want to stay there the chance to do something with a sizeable amount of land.”

Knock says his trip to China made deciding what to do when he graduates in May harder. They have offered him the opportunity to continue his education to pursue a master’s degree in animal science by conducting consumer demand or carcass data research in China, while taking classes in the United States. But, he is not sure if he wants to continue school, get a job or farm.

Knock learned a lot about himself while in China. While he would like to continue to travel, he doubts he will ever leave for four months at a time again.

“You really reaffirm your core values and some of the perceptions you had before are altered a little bit. That’s a good thing because you get to look at things from an outside viewpoint. That’s not something we get a chance to do very often,” Knock said.