Conversion efficiency of porkers’ secondary products: A historical perspective

In this paper, the developmental process of feeding biological efficiency in pork production, from wild boar raising to domestic swine rearing, was analyzed on the basis of the feed conversion rate. The history of domesticating wild boars into reared swine is as long as the history of human settlement, and the distribution of domestication areas was wide. From the primitive clan society to the small farming agricultural society to the modern industrialized society, the biological efficiency of feed conversion in porker raising, from primary production to secondary production, was improved 20 times. The feed conversion rate of porker raising was 1∶8～1∶10 in the primitive clan society, and 1∶4～1∶6 in the small farming agricultural society. Currently, the feed conversion rate of porker raising is 1∶3.5 in the primarily modernized society. In 2017, the share of primarily modern porker raising and that of scattered porker raising by individual households was 50% for each. If scattered porker raising can be transformed into primarily modern porker raising, about 40.05 million tons of Food Equivalent Units (FEU) can be saved,which is about annual production of the Shaanxi, Gansu and Shanxi Provinces. Although a small amount of human food is used as swine feed, there are significant differences in the ecological niches of human food and swine feed. If they are both treated separately in national production planning and statistical data, different projects will be able to provide evidence for rebuilding the Chinese agro-ecosystem, and agricultural productively can be significantly promoted in alignment with the principles of ecosystem diversity.