Continuing from earlier today:
I wanted to show pictures of an incredible Chinese buffet breakfast from our hotel. I could figure out what most of it was, but not everything. I only sampled a few items, but they were all great. Here are some pics:





Fruits, nuts, fungus, and something else.
Remarkably, that is not all. But you get the idea. I suggested to my host, Kai, that we skip farms today and just eat breakfast all day. I should add that the vegetables here do not have the slightly oily taste that one might find with “Chinese food” in the US. One downside is that good coffee seems to be a bit hard to come by, though. I’ll live.
Last night we went to a hot pot restaurant. I am told that the original hot pot was created by a Mongoloian leader one day right before heading to battle. They didn’t have time to properly prepare a meal so he said, “…throw it all in the pot.” So it began.

I know now you probably want to hear more about Chinese dairies . At the moment we are heading to another farm. Hopefully it’s one will let me take pictures, though I am told it is common to prohibit them. From my time here it is clear that , A, there are lots of people to work, and B, labor is pretty cheap, so running a dairy with one FTE per 20 cows can make sense. I asked about robotics was told they were not common on Chinese dairies, which makes sense. I think the labor situation makes it easier to keep farms so neat and tidy. Yesterday we saw people sweeping, raking, and even tilling some areas around the buildings. Everything is very clean, including the cows.
The feed situation is quite interesting too: large square bales of alfalfa with paper wrapping proclaiming “the gold standard”, smaller bales, in a form I have not seen before of oat hay from New Zealand, some other kind of brownish hay that I did not recognize, wheat hay or straw, not sure which, in large bales, and bags and bags of concentrates. I was surprised to see soybean meal in bags on a 5,000 cow dairy. Corn silage is grown here, and one farms grow corn for grain. The only fields I see are winter wheat. Irrigation seems to be common.
Sorry, I think I just made a really large caption. Blogging is new to me; I’ll try to do better. More later…
Thanks for reading, following, or whatever else people do with blogs.