Deep in the Taihang, Baola Waits in Vain for Niu Lai

Foodthink Says

In the box-office hit <em>Ox Come</em>, Ox Come and Bao La are close friends who grow up side by side. But deep in the Taihang Mountains, in the habitat of the Chinese leopard, the relationship between leopards, cattle and people is far more complex. Thanks to the wildlife conservation organisation Cats Alliance, the author of this article visited Leyi Village in Shanxi Province, only to find that the fierce “leopard-eats-ox” conflict so widely reported in the news and witnessed in many other villages is not particularly acute here. The reason: there are simply fewer and fewer cattle farmers.

The author has made research trips into the mountains two years running. What she has witnessed is this: when the cattle no longer come, it is not only Bao La who loses a dear friend — the mountain village and its people are all facing new changes.

One evening last summer, I arrived by car in Leyi Village, Heshun County, Shanxi Province, when suddenly a tinkling sound rose and fell like jade beads colliding. I looked out the window and saw, on the green hillside bathed in the evening light, scattered dots of brown and white — Uncle Yang, a cattle farmer, was herding his twenty-two head down from the mountains, the sound of their bells marking every step.

This is a relatively enclosed river valley deep in the Taihang Mountains. The road winds up a mountain switchback to the summit, then spirals down in ever-tighter circles to the valley floor. In the surrounding forests, Chinese leopards can also be found. At their peak, the village had over two hundred head of cattle; with more than forty households at the time, over half of them raised cattle. For this county, which only shed its “poverty county” label in 2019, cattle were one of the pillar industries.

This summer, a year later, I saw Uncle Yang again, but his cattle pen was already empty. He is not the only one who has withdrawn. Over the past two years, people have one after another sold off all their cattle at low prices; now only three households in the entire village still raise cattle. As the story of <em>Ox Come</em> plays in cinemas, the sound of cattle bells in this small mountain village grows ever more sparse.

Where Do the Cattle Come From

Leyi Village is not suited to farming, but it is suited to raising cattle.

This village, situated in the middle reaches of the Taihang range, feels like winter for three of the four seasons — only summer is different. The annual average temperature is just 9.4 degrees Celsius. The elders in the village say that once the autumn equinox passes, nights turn cold, and you need two quilts to sleep soundly; in the coldest part of winter, temperatures can drop to minus twenty degrees. Such a climate, combined with the high, steep terrain and poor, thin soil, means maize can only be grown once a year — even the wheat common in the north cannot be cultivated, let alone any cash crops.

As for raising cattle, according to the village elders’ recollection, it has been going on at least since the collectivisation era. “Nothing here is good, except the air.” The mountains are rich in plant species, and the cattle that graze on them are well nourished and grow healthier.

Now many of the elders in the village began their cattle-keeping careers in the early 1980s. Uncle Yang, 75 this year, lived through the village collective’s “household responsibility” distribution of cattle: the whole village would gather together to draw lots, the cattle were graded into first, second and third class by condition, prices were set, and whoever drew which lot would pay three or five hundred yuan and lead that particular animal home.

The native “dull” yellow cattle were originally used mainly for ploughing. After the beef cattle industry took off, they were all replaced by imported Simmental beef cattle. But in the early days of marketisation, the “gold content” of beef cattle had yet to reveal itself. For most cattle farmers, raising cattle was not an active choice but a natural inheritance — grandfather herded cattle, father herded cattle, and I herd cattle too. One head became two, two became three. As Uncle Yang puts it, “Our old-timers’ cattle cost us nothing in capital.”

As the domestic beef cattle market developed, villagers began to taste the sweetness. Many told me that around 2021, at the height of the market, a large bull of eight or nine hundred jin could fetch thirty thousand yuan, and a young calf of three or four hundred jin could still bring fifteen thousand. Compared with maize, which yields between 1,200 and 2,000 yuan per mu, the profits from beef cattle were quite considerable.

◉ A cattle farmer adding feed to the pen.

New cattle farmers also entered the industry in those years. Sister Lan, fifty this year, is one of them. The first time I met her, she was herding cattle in an outdoor-style sun hat and a brightly coloured sun-protection jacket, looking remarkably “fashionable” among the herders. She was the new generation of cattle farmers drawn in by the “bull market.” Before returning home in 2021 to raise cattle, she had lived in the provincial capital for thirty years, running her own stall in a garment wholesale market.

But the cattle in Sister Lan’s hands today are neither inherited from her ancestors nor bought outright – they were “borrowed” from a large livestock company. Sister Lan calls this model “foster farming,” a “borrow cows, return calves” arrangement: five years ago, when the market price for a single cow averaged thirty thousand yuan, she used her house as collateral, added a deposit of twenty thousand yuan for every ten cows and a five-thousand-yuan “positioning fee,” and “leased” thirty cows in two tranches. Over several years, she must feed and care for the cows, raise calves, and grow them to a specified weight, which she returns to the company as “interest.” Once she has returned the agreed number of calves, any surplus becomes her own profit. When the contract expires, Sister Lan returns the twenty cows from the first tranche, and the company refunds her deposit.

Neither Sister Lan nor her husband had ever raised cattle before, and things went wrong from the start. After hauling dozens of cows from the farm back to the village, they realised they needed to build a pen. With the help of neighbours, they fumbled their way through it, thinking they were finally settled. Then one morning not long after, they went out to the shed and were stunned – every cow had gone missing, wandering off into the hills to graze. It took them a great deal of effort to round them all up.

“Many people are laughing at us,” she said. But she did not give up. From initially being too timid to approach the large cattle, to eventually learning to deliver calves on her own, Sister Lan and her husband gradually became accomplished cattle farmers, hoping this new enterprise might bring fresh hope to their lives.

Yet 2021, the year Sister Lan entered the industry, saw beef cattle prices near their highest level in recent years – after which they plummeted. Between 2023 and 2025, large cattle that once fetched twenty or thirty thousand yuan dropped off a cliff to six or seven thousand, equivalent to less than ten yuan per kilo of beef.

“It’s not that there’s no income – it’s that the ‘cows eat the cows’ before anything is left.” By “cows eating cows,” she means the money from selling calves is immediately spent on feed again. Today, between the leased cows and the calves they have produced, Sister Lan has over forty head, and the daily feeding cost alone runs to around five hundred yuan. A single winter’s worth of forage and feed “eats up five or six calves.” After five years of hard work, Sister Lan has “not saved a single penny.”

◉In the cold of winter, the cattle are moved from the open-air yard to the roofed cattle shed shown in the image.

Dead cattle fetch more than live ones

Uncle Gui claims he started trading cattle at the age of seventeen and has witnessed every rise and fall in the market. With his rugged features and a roguish, streetwise air that sets him apart from the other villagers, he took a long drag on his cigarette and said: “Look around you – we used to have two hundred head of cattle in our village, and now there are hardly any left.” Leyi Village is down to just three households raising cattle, with a combined total of over seventy head.

In recent years, Uncle Gui has shifted from cattle dealer to cattle broker. The difference is this: a dealer buys from farmers and resells to feedlots for a margin, while a broker acts as an intermediary between farmers and dealers, accompanying dealers to view cattle at the farmers’ premises. If a deal goes through, he earns a commission of one hundred yuan per head from the dealer. He believes market volatility has less impact on brokers – regardless of the final price, his commission is rock solid.

Cattle farmers, however, have not been so composed. Many small-scale holders were forced to sell out their herds during the downturn, selling at a loss. “Seeing everyone else sell, he panicked and rushed to sell too.” “For instance, a cow that could have fetched ten thousand – he let it go for six thousand.”

During the price downturn, even the strange phenomenon of “dead cattle fetching more than live ones” emerged.

A local insurance manager told me that since 2020, government-subsidised beef cattle insurance has been rolled out across the countryside, covering cattle that die from non-natural causes. The Heshun County government actively supports the beef cattle industry, and local insurers have launched targeted assistance programmes. For those who purchase beef cattle insurance, individuals only bear 20 per cent of the cost – that is, on a premium of five hundred yuan per head, the government covers four hundred and the individual pays one hundred.

◉Previously, insurance claims relied on ear tags — the bright yellow labels attached to a cow’s ear, bearing an alphanumeric code that served as the animal’s identity number. Upon receiving a report of a cow’s death, insurance staff would travel to the site to inspect, and by matching the ear tag to the cow’s policy details, they could process the payout.

The compensation is based primarily on the animal’s weight. As a rule, a young cow qualifies for three to five thousand yuan, while a full-grown cow can receive eight thousand to ten thousand yuan. This means that in a soft market, a live cow might not fetch seven thousand yuan, yet an ‘accidental’ death could yield a payout of over ten thousand.

As the market swings, so does people’s morale. Both Lan-jie and Uncle Yang have heard of insurance fraud: some people lose a young calf but present a full-grown cow’s ear tag to file the claim, or, as one put it, ‘if a cow isn’t in good shape, they just let it die on purpose, to collect the insurance.’ The Farmers’ Daily reported on scholarly research finding that from the second half of 2023 to mid-2024, in many regions that had been aggressively rolling out cattle insurance, the mortality rate among insured beef cattle was more than double the normal three per cent, reaching 6.11 per cent.

From early 2025, ‘face scanning’ began to replace ear tags. Insurance company staff came to the village and used a mobile app to capture the facial features of every insured cow, entering the data into the system to create a record. ‘Cattle face recognition’ can verify an animal’s identity with precision, eliminating the risk of duplicate claims or claims on uninsured animals.

But now that the insurance company has plugged the loophole, cattle farmers face a new predicament. In the mountains, deaths from non-natural causes include disease, but also being killed by a landslide, bitten by a venomous snake, or attacked by a leopard or other wild animal. If a cow dies in the mountains where there is no mobile signal, the carcass has to be carried to a spot with coverage before ‘cattle face recognition’ can be carried out. In summer, when temperatures are high, if a cow dies in the mountains and is not found in time, it may decompose beyond recognition. And if the carcass cannot be located at all, there is no claim to be made.

But this is not what keeps Taihang Mountain cattle farmers up at night.

People Grow Old, Cattle Grow Cheap

If falling cattle prices are the common reason farmers give up, ageing only deepens the village’s predicament.

Last summer, when I first met Uncle Yang tending his herd, he held a whip in one hand and a shovel in the other—thin but wiry, with a group of cattle grazing behind him. He noticed my gaze and broke into a beaming smile. I couldn’t resist lifting the camera and capturing the moment.

A year later, when I saw Uncle Yang again, he was leaning on a stick, his frame slightly stooped. He told me his legs hurt too much to make the climb, and his wife had fallen and injured her lumbar spine, leaving her bedridden and in need of constant care. He was forced to ‘retire,’ it seemed. Last year he sold all twenty-two of his cattle for 140,000 yuan—just over six thousand per head—and with that, forty-odd years of herding came to an end.

Uncle Li, one of the three remaining cattle-keeping households in Leyi Village, is seventy-two this year. He told me, ‘I can manage at most three more years before I simply can’t do it anymore.’

The old people in the village recall that every year on the eleventh day of the seventh lunar month, there was a temple fair in Sitou Village, fifteen li from Leyi. It was once the largest trading market in the area; people from far and wide would drive their livestock and bring agricultural produce to trade there. Lan-jie’s grandfather had been a cattle broker. He would help buyers and sellers find each other, then slip his hands under his robe or into his sleeves, counting out numbers finger by finger until both sides reached an agreement.

Back then, people sold cattle on the strength of their own two feet, driving them all the way to Xiyang, seventy kilometres away. Now, cattle dealers come to the door, and farmers can complete a sale without leaving home—no more long, exhausting journeys. But smallholders have become even more dependent on the dealers, especially as young people from the countryside have left in such numbers that anyone under fifty-five in the village counts as ‘prime-age.’ Elderly farmers, who tend small herds and lack access to information and channels, have no way of reaching downstream buyers and can only wait passively for a dealer to come and collect.

If a dealer can’t buy from one household, he simply moves on to the next. ‘They say it’s worth whatever they say it’s worth.’ Cattle farmers have less and less room to negotiate.

A Livelihood, and a Life

Rise at five in the morning; clean the byre, add hay and feed for the calves. Around six, drive the adult cattle out and up into the mountains to graze, walking until you’ve reached a suitable spot, then turning back. By half past seven you’re home for breakfast and off to the fields. A rest after lunch, then back up the mountain in the early afternoon to tend the herd. Before dark, drive the cattle back to the pen and have dinner. Lights out just after nine—this is a typical day for a cattle herder in Leyi Village. This rigidly structured routine is a way of living with the mountains and the cattle that they have worked out over many years.

One afternoon last summer, I went up into the mountains with Auntie Xiu to graze the cattle. We passed the cattle pen on the hillside behind the village and kept going deeper, past a stone urn. Auntie Xiu told me this was the Mountain God shrine. She knelt down, kowtowed three times, and murmured a few words asking the Mountain God to keep us safe. I knelt and kowtowed three times as well.

◉The ‘Mountain God Shrine’ Along the Herding Path

We pressed on. Before we could catch sight of a single cow, the bells were already reaching us. Auntie Xiu listened for a moment and said they were the Zhu family’s cattle from the village — every family’s bells have a different ring.

When we reached a relatively open clearing among the trees, Auntie Xiu said there was no need to go any deeper; we’d wait here for the cattle to come back. She found a flat stone and sat down. After a while, two other cowherds from the village appeared, and they sat together, swapping a few words.

This patch of grassland on the herding route is something of a makeshift public square for Auntie Xiu and the others — conversation happens here as naturally as breathing. Uncle Yang told me that the mountains are all connected to one another, and sometimes cowherds from different villages cross paths in the hills. When they do, they ‘dao xie dao xie’ — a local expression for taking a sit and having a chat.

The deeper into the mountains you go, the less signal there is. The phone that normally gets used for scrolling through short videos becomes a useless brick. Only the walkie-talkies occasionally crackle to life, their static sharp and grating — a form of communication peculiar to cowherds in these parts. Out here in the silent hills, they keep each other posted through their radios.

◉Sister Lan not only bought a walkie-talkie for herself but also gave some to fellow cattle herders in the village to make it easier to stay in touch.

When the cattle were coming home, I asked Auntie Xiu, out of curiosity, whether they let the herd wander up into the mountains on its own without worrying it would get scattered. She said they wouldn’t: “If one cow finds the grass is better in a spot, she’ll call the others over — “The grass is really good here, come and have a bite!”” Auntie Xiu trusts the cattle. Deep in the mountains, if you can’t tell which way is which, “just follow the cattle, and you’ll always find your way out.”

Auntie Xiu has had cattle in her life since she was a small child. Back then, she would walk ahead of the herd holding the rope while her father walked behind, cracking the whip to drive them forward. “Cattle are very gentle. You can pat their heads, stroke their faces, and they won’t get angry. When you comb their coats, they shut their eyes with a kind of contentment.” As she talks about those days, Auntie Xiu’s face breaks into a wide smile.

“I used to love cattle so much when I was little,” she says. But now, cattle wear 55-year-old Auntie Xiu out. “I don’t like them anymore. It’s too tiring — just seeing them makes me irritable.” When I visited Auntie Xiu’s home again this summer, they no longer kept any cattle.

Herd cattle is more than just a means of livelihood.

An elderly man in the village has an intellectual disability and struggles to look after himself; his daily life depends on his younger brother’s care. Yet a companion told me she once saw him cracking his whip and driving the cattle with a sureness that took her by surprise. In that moment, she saw in him a kind of vitality unlike anything from his everyday life.

While I was staying in the village, a pregnant cow went up into the mountains and didn’t come back for three days. The villagers went up every day to search, worried she might have calved in the mountains and the calf been taken by a leopard. One day I went up and came upon a villager driving a cow back down the slope, a calf following close at her heels — its reddish-brown markings rich and full, the white parts as clean as snow. In the moment the calf fluttered its white lashes and fixed me with its gaze, I felt something sacred in the life before me.

I don’t know whether, for a villager who has raised cattle for generations, a newborn calf can still stir the same emotional response. But I think that for a small mountain village where the population is thinning and the people are growing old, the arrival of new life means at least a trace of change.

◉A villager brings back the mother cow and her newborn calf

Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave

After a few years of a market freeze, cattle prices have finally begun to recover this year. The farmers told me, visibly pleased, that heifers of three to four hundred jin can now fetch six or seven thousand, and young bulls can even top ten thousand.

From 2026, China will impose an additional 55 per cent tariff on beef imports above the quota, and the total annual import quota has been cut. Layer that on top of the farmers who were driven out in the previous few years, and it has, in effect, opened up room for prices to rise among those still in the business. Yet these grander structural forces behind the market’s ups and downs are barely perceptible in a small mountain village. What tends to drive people to leave—or to hold on—is usually a far more immediate, personal reality.

Take Sister Lan, for instance. Her five-year ‘lease’ is about to expire, but she hasn’t finished repaying the ‘interest’ yet. She wants to wait until she’s had ‘one more calf that was due,’ and once the terms are fulfilled, she’ll carry on raising cattle. It’s not that she loves the animals—it’s that ‘once you’ve raised this whole lot, it’s like having children. You’ve had them since they were tiny, and you can’t bear to let go—nor could you, even if you tried.’

Sister Lan got into the business in 2021, when cattle prices were at their peak. This year’s modest recovery means little to her beyond shaving a few losses. But she has grown accustomed to life alongside the cattle and wants to ‘make it a proper career’—to keep at it, rather than change direction again. ‘When the two of us are still on our feet, we take the cattle out to graze. When we’re not, as long as we can still pick up a shovel and put out some feed, and give them a bit of maize at home, they’ll eat. Even if we don’t keep many, eight or ten is enough to keep us going.’

After selling all his cattle, Uncle Yang suddenly felt as though a piece of his life was missing. Before, every morning he would get up and make his way to the cattle shed; every evening he’d top up the feed. While feeding them, he’d talk to the cattle, gently stroking the tops of their heads. Now he has hours on his hands and doesn’t know what to do with them.

If it weren’t for his aching legs, he really wouldn’t have wanted to sell them. ‘You sell them, and in the moment you feel fine, but once it’s done and someone’s hauled them off, it weighs on you. It’s like raising a daughter and watching her marry and leave. You’re happy at the time, but the moment she’s gone, your heart just isn’t at ease.’

‘You keep thinking, day after day, for a month, then another. One day you reckon it all up, and slowly, you just stop thinking about it.’

– This is Foodthink’s 835 th original article –