Cargill Animal Nutrition (China), led by new President Hongfei Zheng since last year, has been praised by the industry for its innovative digital marketing and value chain interaction. But for the newly launched 5S "smart pig" program and its concept of "only efficiency can reduce costs", the company stressed that this is not a slogan, nor is it for marketing.
"It's a really integrated solution to help our farming customers achieve visible production performance improvements that are resistant to industry cycle fluctuations." Li Yi, Strategic Marketing and Technology Director of Cargill Animal Nutrition China, told Pastoral Food.
With the recovery of pig production, China's pig prices continued to decline after the first quarter of this year, and by June there had been industry-wide losses. "As for how long this downward cycle will last, we don't have a very clear answer at the moment." Li Yi pointed out that this round of pig cycle is not the same as before, due to the normalization of the non-plague epidemic, the operating costs of pig farms are further rising, and the overall management complexity has also increased.
"What is the biggest need of our customers at the moment? The answer is self-evident, which is to survive such a cycle and have better opportunities for development in the future. He said that unlike the traditional "cost reduction and efficiency increase", the "efficiency reduction and cost reduction" of Cargill's 5S solution has a completely different underlying logic, which pays more attention to "open source" rather than "throttling", because only by continuously improving production performance can we truly improve profitability and resist market fluctuation risks.
"Breeding enterprises must first make a fundamental change in concept, do not fall into the anxiety of blindly pursuing cost reduction, in fact, there are many costs that cannot be reduced, right?"
Li Yi
Li Yi said that as a leading global provider of overall animal nutrition solutions, Cargill Animal Nutrition has always been adhering to the concept of "China in China", bringing together global nutrition resources, focusing on local customer needs, and constantly seeking breakthroughs and innovations.
How to increase efficiency
Focusing on the five key points of scientific pig raising of sows, piglets, farm management, feeding management and data management, Cargill Animal Nutrition has proposed a 5S (the first letter of the English name of each part) solution composed of super sows, super piglets, super services, smart nutrition and intelligent data, and officially released it for the Chinese market on August 18.
"In fact, helping customers improve efficiency is a consistent core value proposition of Cargill Animal Nutrition, only this time it corresponds to this round of downward cycles." It's also timely to launch. Li Yi pointed out.
For example, in sows, by using the amino acid energy balance system of Cargill breeding pigs, strengthening the application of functional amino acids and vitamins, using higher standards of raw materials and more reasonable raw material composition, as well as the application of micronutrition technology and non-specific immune enhancement function packages, combined with scientific sow feeding procedures and sow feeding management points, farms can help farms continuously improve sow production performance. According to the company's calculations, for every 2 points increase in PSY (the number of weaned piglets provided by each sow per year), the cost of weaned piglets can be reduced by 50 yuan / head, while the current PSY level in China and Europe is still as high as 12 (18 vs. 30) gap.
In addition, cargill super sow solutions can eliminate low-yield sows on farms in a timely manner, reducing invisible waste, and timely breeding of high-production performance gilts to ensure that the farm sow herd is properly structured.
Similarly, through the "intestinal health enhancement program, palatability improvement program, new microcredit material type" three major initiatives to upgrade the suckling piglet feed products, Cargill Super Piglet Solution can help enhance the growth of suckling piglets, to achieve each piglet to earn 30 yuan more. The smart nutrition solution, which has comprehensively upgraded the product design and feeding procedures, can also help each commercial pig save 40 yuan in feed costs.
Yi Li summarized three key words for Cargill Super Services solutions: safe, simple and efficient. "In particular, safety involves the concept of 'avoiding costs', because under the normalization of non-plague, if the prevention is not in place, breeding enterprises will face a difference between 0 and 1 - once there is a loss, it is a total loss."
To this end, Cargill particularly emphasized the implementation of its non-plague prevention and control 3.0 plan, and regarded batch management and data management as the two golden keys to pig farm management. In terms of intelligent data, Cargill can help customers fully understand the existing situation of their own pig farm through mini programs or software, grasp the break-even line, and predict the best time to maximize efficiency, and truly achieve efficiency and cost reduction.
"Through such a combination of 5S 'smart pig raising' schemes, we are very confident that we can help Chinese breeding enterprises further improve their breeding efficiency and profitability, and more importantly, help them improve their ability to cross the pig cycle." Li Yi said.
More than just cost reduction
While Cargill has traditionally been considered primarily a food trader, animal nutrition has become a core segment of its overall business, to some extent playing a "top-down" role.
Zhang Yan, risk control and procurement director of Cargill Animal Nutrition China, pointed out that it is precisely because Cargill has a longer industrial chain extension, such as from the upstream oil pressing platform to the downstream meat production platform, which makes the company more advantageous in maintaining the stability of the industrial chain and the risk control of raw materials, and the profit distribution of different links is more reasonable. Its own business practices have also enabled the company to gain more market insights, so that it can better serve upstream and downstream customers.
Zhang Yan
"We are the world's leading agricultural products company, with high-quality resources and channels all over the world, and the resources of various regions are relatively diversified, so that we can grasp the price and value of raw materials between different origins, and serve markets including China by providing the best value." Zhang Yan said that from quotation to organizing the supply of goods to transportation to port, Cargill can help achieve security of raw material supply by providing the continuity of an industrial chain.
For the risk control of raw material procurement, he believes that first of all, there must be a correct interpretation of the market, and secondly, there must be the ability to extend or shorten the position. At the same time, in this process, it is necessary to find some alternative raw materials to reduce the overall cost. "That way, when the customer has a need, you can share it with him."
Of course, "In addition to cost considerations, our corporate values are to be responsible for our customers. Zhang Yan said.