PIC, a division of Genus and the world's leading swine genetics company, announces agreement with the Shennong Agricultural Group to jointly invest in the operation of a 1,000-sow nucleus farm in China's Yunnan province. Located in the southwest of the country, Yunnan is home to some 2.5 million sows.
Shennong Agricultural Group is the leading pig integrator in Yunnan province, employing more than 2,000 people. Since beginning operations as a commercial feed mill in 1999, the privately held firm has established pig production farms and value-added slaughtering, meat processing and retailing businesses. There are currently four multiplication units supplying over 10,000 breeding gilts a year to commercial sow farms, and 26 contract finishing sites for 300,000 market hogs produced annually. Downstream, the company operates two slaughter plants with combined capacity of three million pigs. Its facility in Kunming is the largest in Yunnan.
Shennong aims to expand its feed-to-fork integration by growing the production base to 80,000 sows with output of two million slaughter pigs a year by 2018. The collaboration with PIC builds on the relationship forged between the two companies based on the operation of in-house PIC multiplication. This successful track record convinced the companies to scale up their cooperation and work together to realize a sustainable platform to support their respective targets for growth.
Zuxun He, founder and chairman of Shennong, said, "Shennong has worked with PIC in China over the last nine years as we have developed our farming operations. We now have aggressive targets for expanding our pig production system as we develop an integrated supply chain to provide safe, healthy pork products to our customers. We are very pleased to have sealed this partnership with PIC to strengthen further our relationship and to provide a dedicated supply of PIC's world class genetics to meet the needs of our expansion plans."
Nancy Jiang, General Manager of Genus China, noted, "This is the latest in a series of announcements from PIC testifying to the company's commitment and drive to expand its footprint in the world's largest pork market. The country's industry is in transition from its historically volatile small farm base, a move which is supported by government policy to improve the security and hygiene of the pork supply chain. PIC is becoming the partner of choice for the large integrated projects that are proliferating as China continues to scale up its production."
The new farm will be stocked with great-grandparents from PIC's High Health Global Supply Chain later in the year. The joint venture, which will be managed by PIC, will produce grandparent females to drive Shennong's expansion and enhance PIC's capacity to supply its signature genetics to other leading players that are emerging in the rapid consolidation of China's pig industry.
