Thursday, January 6, 2011

The final leg of my journey: China

I realized after scanning through my blog that I didn't post on China after posting about both Japan and Taiwan in my trip with the 2010 Corn Mission to Asia! You can read about the business portion of my trip to China here. So here are a few pictures about the best parts of China that I experienced.

The two main cities that we visited in China were Shanghai and Guangzhou. One of the first things we saw in China was the Shanghai container sea port. This was ginormous and could hold up to 17 large sea vessels (which holds thousands of containers that you see going down the interstate on semi trailers). On the way to he sea port, we drove on an 18-mile bridge in the water - all you could see the water around you was water. Except for a wind farm. That's right - they constructed a wind farm in the bay!

We also got to visit some ag specific locations - like feed mills and a hog research facility. The pigs below are a Chinese breed of hogs and the people prefer the taste of their pork (which is why we send corn and DDGS from the US over to China to feed these types of hogs. We also export a log of US pork to China as well because they can't meet demand with their domestic production.). They were the ugliest and cutest things you've ever seen! And we got to wear awesome jumpsuits.


After Shanghai, we flew to Guangzhou and one of the first places we went was a dairy. Unlike the hogs, these cows were English breeds and looked just like they do in the U.S. They feed the cows a ration of chopped corn silage (from corn in China) and U.S. imported alfalfa and DDGS. They also make their own plant fertilizer from the manure.

We visited a feed mill were they import US DDGS to feed livestock and aquaculture (fish). Below is a picture of piles of DDGS, an upclose of those dried distillers grains, and the tanks where the fish are fed.


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