PORK PRODUCTION SYSTEMS IN CHINA: A REVIEW OF THEIR DEVELOPMENT, CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS IN GREEN PRODUCTION

Highlights

•Large-scale industrial pork production enterprises are preferred in China in the future.

•Challenges to green pork production include emissions, feed shortage and residues.

•Potential solutions to green production include precise feeding and manure recycling.

Abstract

This paper reviews the changes in pork production in China, the largest pork producing and consuming nation in the world. The pork sector in China has changed dramatically since the 1990s, with large-scale intensive pork production systems replacing the former, exclusively family-based pork production systems. Modern breeding, feeding, vaccinating, and management technologies are widely used now. However, smallholders still account for a large proportion of the total production. The intensification and specialization of the pork sector is expected to continue in the future, but there is increasing awareness and pressure to develop more environmentally-sustainable production systems. The relative shortage of domestically produced feed, the low utilization efficiency of feed ingredients, the large emissions of nitrogen and phosphorus to the environment, the high use of antibiotics, and the presence of residual metals in manures are very large challenges for the pork sector nowadays. To solve these problems, techniques including new feed resource utilization, precise feeding, low-protein diets, alternatives to antibiotics and increased manure recycling are all important topics and research directions today. With new techniques and management approaches, it is possible to build more sustainable pork production systems in China.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

China / feed / pork production / sustainability

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32072764, 31702121, 31630074, and 31972596), Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2018HH0160), and Chinese Scholarship Council (201913043).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Shuai Zhang, Xin Wu, Dandan Han, Yong Hou, Jianzhuang Tan, Sung Woo Kim, Defa Li, Yulong Yin, and Junjun Wang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)