What’s It Like to ‘Herd Pigs’ on the Loess Plateau?
Every time I make a pork mince sauce, my mind drifts to those gleeful mountain-roaming black pigs in the hills of Gansu, and to this spring’s visit with the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market to see Wu Longlong, the young “pig herder” who returned to his hometown.
I. Homecoming
He was of medium build, dressed in a plain dark smock, black trousers and cloth shoes, looking trim and capable. He had been waiting for a while, his face flushed ruddy by the slanting sun. Set against the distant loess, it did rather fit the “stereotype” of a northwestern man.
The glasses perched on his nose and his neat, scholarly fringe, however, hinted at the rare formal education within this community of returning young farmers. Wu Longlong was a true Qingyang boy, born in 1988. He graduated from Beijing University of Agriculture in 2015 with a degree in animal science, yet never once entertained the notion of seeking work in a city. Straight after graduation, he resolutely returned to his home county of Ning.
Ning County sits on the ancient lands of the state of Yiqu from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Tucked away in the Longdong region, it has long been dogged by poor transport links and limited access to information. Wu Longlong told us that high-speed rail only reached the county in 2020. “Back then every single train was packed — even the old folk were desperate to hop on a ride to Xi’an for a wander around,” he said. Before that, whether heading south to Xi’an or west to Lanzhou, the journey was a real hardship.
Yet Qingyang, the prefecture to which Ning County belongs, has long been known as the “Granary of Longdong”. Here lies the world’s deepest loess deposits, ideal for farming, and the region is one of China’s principal areas for growing coarse grains. The Malian River and the Jiulong River within Ning County’s borders flow into the Jing River, part of the Yellow River system. The flow of both rivers remains fairly abundant to this day, and paddy rice can be grown along their banks.
In his first year or two back home, Wu Longlong set out to harness the region’s remarkably rich agricultural resources and practise a circular model combining crop cultivation with livestock rearing. He organised villagers into a cooperative, raised cattle and sheep, and planted broomcorn millet across several hundred mu of contracted wasteland. But once the grain was harvested, there was no market to sell it to. It could only be dumped at bargain prices as ordinary produce, and he lost every penny he had invested.
Adrift in bewilderment, Wu Longlong decided to “get out there”. He attended the Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Centre’s Lead Goose Programme and a training course for new farmers in northwestern China, making many ecological-farming friends along the way. Before long, he resolved to refocus his strategy on ecological animal husbandry, sharpening his skills in pork butchery and market connections.
Once his thinking opened up, a turning point in sales followed swiftly. In August 2019, Wu Longlong was invited to appear on Hunan TV’s variety programme Day Day Up. In March 2020, CCTV-17’s Getting Rich Guide reported on his story of returning home to start a business. These two moments of “breaking out” carried his vision and ecological produce to a far wider audience of consumers.
We piled into his Wuling pickup, the one he normally uses for hauling pigs and supplies, ready to drive straight to the farm. The sat-nav estimated just over an hour and forty minutes from the station to our destination. “Drive it right and you’ll be there in just over an hour,” Wu Longlong said.
II. Herding Pigs
In her report The Chinese Pork Miracle, livestock specialist Xie Minyi notes that the abundant pork supply owes much to government support for large-scale, industrialised and standardised pork production. By 2023, large-scale pig farms (those sending more than 500 head to market per year) accounted for 68 per cent of the domestic market. In other words, most of the pork we eat day to day comes from operations like these. Breeds with higher dressing percentages, cramped living spaces, and ever-shorter time to market are all accelerating the loss of flavour in pork.
The mere thought of pork carrying that faint gamy tang made my desire to see the black pigs in person all the more urgent. And what’s more, Wuluo Village, where Wu Longlong lets his pigs roam, sits right on the doorstep of Gansu’s Ziwuling National Nature Reserve — his own home ground.
As we set off, the view outside was mostly a wash of yellow, broken now and then by streaks of grey-green. The deeper we drove, the flatter the hills became and the richer the vegetation. “In summer the mountains turn lush green — a completely different world from what you see now! The ecology up here is wonderful. Leopards, badgers, wild boar, rabbits, deer… every kind of animal,” Wu Longlong said. Only later did we learn that the most densely populated and numerically largest known population of North China leopards is found within the Ziwuling Nature Reserve.
Living right on the reserve’s border, losing a few pigs to leopard predation each year is inevitable. Yet Wu Longlong was less worried than one might expect. He told us that pigs are social animals and when a predator strikes, the entire herd turns and fights back as one. “They’re formidable!”
Facing a steady stream of questions from his Market colleagues, Wu Longlong proved voluble, candid and thoroughly knowledgeable, turning the exchange into something like a rapid-fire quiz show — answering questions and driving at the same time without missing a beat. As the light faded, the pickup veered off the paved road and plunged onto a dirt track threading through the hills. The lane was narrow, the gradients steep, and we all instinctively gripped the handholds.
“Hmm — driving that pickup like a proper off-roader! This road’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it… let’s just get there safely,” said Wang Rui, who handles farm visits for the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, breaking a rare silence after a quiet drive. For Wu Longlong, this was the route he took every morning and evening to tend his pigs — second nature to him. “You get used to it!” he replied.
After a bone-jarring ride, we finally reached a small patch of flat ground squeezed between a row of cave dwellings and a deep ravine. Rather than a proper sty, what we found was little more than a few makeshift fences of wire mesh and wooden posts, propped against disused cave dwellings. The pigs kept here wander off into the hills to forage and play during the day, then return to the caves at night to rest, drink, and pick over a small measure of supplementary maize.
Unlike the backyard pig-raising common in rural areas, Wu Longlong’s black pigs spend eight months of the year roaming the hills, combining free-range and penned rearing. Everyone here “herds” their pigs this way. Letting the herd move freely through the valleys to forage saves on both feed costs and the outlay on housing and land.
Having never seen pigs herded before, I couldn’t help but wonder — what do the black pigs eat up on the mountain?
“Mind you, the woods look bare enough now, but come May, the hillside is full of Manchurian rose hips — sweet little things the pigs absolutely love,” Wu Longlong told us. Once the stream ice melts, the food on the mountain grows far more plentiful. Day to day, the herd roots through the undergrowth for fresh grass, nibbles dandelion leaves, catches insects and laps up spring water, managing to fill themselves more than half full. Each pig needs only half a jin (250 g) of maize grain as a daily supplement. Come autumn, when the acorns ripen and tumble down, supplementary maize loses all appeal — the pigs gorge on acorns to their heart’s content.
Wu Longlong explained that supplementary feeding isn’t just about filling bellies; it’s also to stop the pigs from going feral, from falling in with wild boar herds, so they can “recognise their keeper.” After all, wild boar in the hills are never fed by a soul — yet they thrive just fine, don’t they? In truth, once a penned herd has learned to find food and water on the mountain, it no longer needs a human — it’s only the human who needs the pig.
III. Roaming the Hills
The next morning, we finally laid eyes on the legendary mountain-roaming black pigs.
These pigs are reared by partner farmers in a neighbouring county. Wu Longlong has leased a hilltop near the village and lets three herds roam free, each numbering roughly thirty-odd head. “Hard to count them exactly — about that many.”
The hill paths are steeper here, and only a farm three-wheeler can get up and down. The moment the herd spots a familiar face or the rattle of the three-wheeler, they come trotting over with boundless enthusiasm, wagging their heads and tails, convinced it’s time for supper.
Wu Longlong admitted with a slight flush that the pigs are at their least photogenic right now. And indeed, the young piglets were sharp-boned and gaunt — the hillside grass had barely begun to sprout, with little to graze on, so none of them had put on any flesh yet. Still, they looked perfectly content, after all, they had the entire hillside to themselves.
We walked on, tracing the evidence of the black pigs’ comings and goings. Wu Longlong pointed at a patch of ground trampled soft and loose. “The pigs dig their own nests — they sleep right here at night,” he said. It genuinely looked cosy.
Generally speaking, a penned Gansu black pig takes close to ten months to reach a market weight of just over two hundred jin. But free-range black pigs, living wild and racking up miles of exercise, can take over a year to mature. However, the meat of overwintered pigs — those kept through the year — is richer in aromatic compounds and has a slightly higher lean meat ratio than their penned counterparts, giving a beautifully balanced fat-to-lean texture.
Half of Wu Longlong’s piglets are bred on the farm; the other half are sourced from local villagers. He prefers piglets raised rough-and-tumble in the courtyard over those brought up in warming boxes. “Those little ones have no resistance — put them on the mountain and they won’t survive.”
Young piglets are delicate, prone to illness, and far more vulnerable to wild predators, so newly collected piglets are penned for a while first, and their feed differs from that of adult pigs. They must be fed cooked maize, wheat, and beans, and the grain must not be ground too fine, or it will trigger diarrhoea. Once they reach four months old, piglets can be released onto the mountain.
Compared to fully penned pigs, the hill-roaming pigs in the woods are rugged and well-built. Should one fall ill, Wu Longlong turns first to traditional Chinese veterinary medicine. If a pig has gorged on too many apricots and developed internal heat, for instance, he brews an herbal decoction for it.
When traditional remedies truly cannot help, he will resort to antibiotics. Such pigs, of course, are fitted with ear tags for separate handling, dosed strictly according to regulations, and given a full withdrawal period before being sold as ordinary pork to local villagers.
In recent years, roughly ten to twenty pigs are lost each year to illness, leopard predation, or feral escape. On this visit we met a survivor — the “One-Eyed Hero,” a pig that lost sight in one eye and had a gaping wound torn in its thigh during a fight with a leopard, yet clung stubbornly on to life. Herding pigs with the Ziwuling Reserve at your back: perhaps that’s some measure of fortune woven into misfortune.
To trim losses, Wu Longlong plans to tighten up day-to-day management, set a sensible limit on the herd’s grazing radius, and keep a firmer grip on the cycle of market dates. Another row of cave dwellings by his doorstep marks out the plot he has earmarked for a new pen.
IV. Home and Hearth
Wu Longlong spoke openly about how his father had once been a compulsive gambler, racking up sizeable debts across the village. When Wu Longlong returned home after graduating, villagers came knocking to collect on his father’s gambling tab. He laid down the law: “Any other debt, I’ll make sure to pay off — but gambling debts? Not a penny!” He and his father clashed bitterly over the habit, but in the end, he succeeded in getting him to quit.
His second uncle was left with both physical and intellectual disabilities after an injection as a child and remains unmarried to this day, living with Wu Longlong’s parents. Once Wu Longlong came home to build his farm, he gave his uncle a steady job herding sheep. Relatives who had scattered across the country for migrant work have, little by little, drifted back together around the ecological farm.
Alongside the ongoing negotiation with his extended family, Wu Longlong has built a household of his own. During the pandemic, he fell in love with Qiqi, a young woman from Guangdong who had come to volunteer at the farm. They married and had an adorable daughter, Watermelon. On the evening of our farm visit, we sat down in a farmhouse courtyard on the Loess Plateau to a home-cooked Cantonese spread — an uncanny sense of displacement crept over me, and I couldn’t help marvelling at the strangeness of fate.
After a decade of swimming against the current, Wu Longlong has finally built a home and a livelihood in the hometown he loves with all his heart, producing solid, down-to-earth results. His story is now inspiring a new generation of returning young entrepreneurs across Gansu. Another ten years on, what will Muchutongxin Ecological Farm look like?
Author
Z X
A colleague on Foodthink’s project team and Dishwashing Division.
Zeren
Foodthink editor, a Shaanxi native whose lifelong passion is noodles. His skill at making pork mince sauce still needs work.
Unless otherwise stated, all images are courtesy of Foodthink and Muchutongxin Ecological Farm
Editor: Zeren