Meaning of Livestock

Livestock refers to traditional livestock and poultry, mainly wild animals that have been domesticated and raised in captivity, can reproduce offspring normally, and have a certain economic value to humans.

Expanded Information

Data from the 2018 China Statistical Yearbook shows that by the end of 2017, China had 90.39 million head of cattle, 302.32 million sheep and 702.02 million meat hogs per year, with a year-end inventory of 441.59 million. The corresponding total meat output was 86.54 million tons, total milk output was 31.49 million tons, and total poultry and egg output reached 30.96 million tons, greatly improving people's living standards and quality.

According to statistics, there are about 12,800 pig farms with more than 1,000 heads in stock, cattle farms with more than 100 heads in stock and chicken farms with more than 100,000 feathers in stock in China, and in 2017, the scale rate of livestock and poultry breeding reached about 58%. The superposition of multiple pressures, such as the growing demand for livestock and poultry products, the rapid withdrawal of small-scale farming retail households and the increasing shortage of labor resources, has prompted China's livestock industry to green transformation and upgrading in the direction of scale, intensification and standardization.

Improving the quality of the farming environment in large-scale farming, reducing labor inputs, improving livestock and poultry production efficiency, and realizing the rationalization and standardization of farming management with high efficiency, high profitability and high environmental protection is a major problem facing the transformation and upgrading of China's livestock and poultry farming industry at present.

By body size classification can be divided into small, medium, large three kinds of livestock and poultry. For example, rabbits have small varieties (adult body weight of 2.5kg or less), medium-sized varieties (adult body weight of 3-5kg), large varieties (adult body weight of 5kg or more); horses have small horses or ponies (ponies in Yunnan, China, and miniature horses in Argentina), medium-sized horses (Mongolian horses), and heavy-duty horses (heavy-drawn horses).

By the length of the tail or the size of the classification of sheep have a large-tailed varieties (big-tailed cold sheep), small-tailed varieties (small-tailed cold sheep), and fat-tailed varieties (Uzhumuqin sheep) and so on. According to the hair color or feather color classification pig has black, white, spotted, red and other varieties; chicken rutabaga feathers, white feathers, red feathers, etc. are important breed characteristics; some sheep varieties of black head, Himalayan rabbit eight points of black and so on are also typical of the breed characteristics.