Word: inners
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...though it comes decades after overgrazing began - will be necessary to recover one of the world's largest and most endangered grasslands. Solutions have to sustainable, but more importantly, they have to be useful, says Jim O'Rourke, who is helping organize the International Grassland and Rangeland CONGRESS in Inner Mongolia next summer. "'Preserving' is a touchy word. Preserving might mean locking [the grasslands] up," O'Rourke says. This land evolved with animals and people living on it, and keeping it healthy will mean resisting the urge to turn it into a museum...
...Timberlake's dusty patch is not in Missouri - it's in China. Earlier this year, Western Cattle started to raise Holsteins on an American-style ranch and feedlot built in the wide open spaces of Inner Mongolia. Their goal: deliver truckloads of well-marbled beef to the waiting plates of urban China's growing middle class. With a target herd of 75,000, U.S.-based Western Cattle has the potential to be the leading company in the third-largest beef-producing nation in the world. And if the company's Western take on raising cattle catches on in the East...
...Mueller and his partners chose to set up their first feedlot outside Hohhot, Inner Mongolia's capital, partly because of the local government's aggressive pro-investment policies. Among other things, officials helped the company find land and provided introductions to potential business partners. Ultimately, though, it came down to the fact that Hohhot is a cow town. Two of China's biggest dairies, Mengniu and Yili, have headquarters in the area, and buy milk from thousands of farmers who raise dairy cows in their front yards. There are more than a million cows around Hohhot; the bustling city...
...Some worry that the livelihoods of small farmers will be threatened as Inner Mongolian agriculture modernizes. Western Cattle is providing farmers with an additional source of income, and the farmers are providing the company with inexpensive labor. But big feedlots in the U.S. are essentially factories, much larger than the biggest in China today, maintaining herds of tens of thousands of animals supplied by dedicated cattle ranches. As the industry grows, farmers could be squeezed out. Even now, they are at the mercy of middlemen like the dairies, which have some control over pricing. The farmers have none. "Only...
...Officials in Hohhot don't see it that way. In the past seven years, the city has almost doubled in both population and physical size, a trend that's in keeping with Inner Mongolia's recent double-digit growth rates. Officials welcome Western Cattle's feedlots as a way to use marginal land, create jobs and produce more food. "If we have a very good feedlot here, it will help people become wealthy," says Teng Guiyuan of Hohhot's Bureau of Investment Attraction. "Small farmers want to make money, but they aren't powerful enough. They need a big company...