On September 4, 2026, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs issued the National Plan for the Development of the Livestock and Veterinary Industry during the”15th Five-Year” Plan Period (Nong Mu Fa [2026] No. 9). The document contains many targets,but one sentence is easy to skim past — Part Two, Item (1) requires: “accelerate the interconnection of data across all links of the industry chain,including feed, farming, quarantine, transport, slaughter and rendering treatment,promote the deep integration of business flow and data flow, and implement precise industry management and effective regulation.”
Six links, written into one sentence
From feed to rendering treatment, all six links are covered. What is really worth noting in this item is this:rendering treatment used to appear mostly in chapters on “epidemic prevention” or “ecological protection,”treated as a disposal cost at the end of the chain; this time, it has been written into the industrial regulation clause as a data node.
Why must the chain be connected? The targets in Column 1 make it clear:the on-arrival reporting rate for livestock and poultry transported across provinces is to rise from 83% to 95%,the number of animal disease purification farms, disease-free farms and disease-free zones is to grow from 812 to 1,110,and the share of pig slaughterhouses above the designated scale is to rise from 45% to 50%.These numbers cannot be delivered in real time, nor cross-checked, if they rely on layer-by-layer manual reporting.
AI gets its own dedicated clause this time
In Part Six of the plan, Item (20) is titled precisely “accelerating the application of artificial intelligence and the development of smart animal husbandry.”The actions listed are concrete: facilities and equipment for precision feeding, intelligent environment control,intelligent sensing, precision recognition and health inspection; high-throughput intelligent phenotyping equipment for livestock and poultry;building large-scale, multimodal, high-quality datasets for smart breeding and the farming process;developing dedicated AI agents such as breeding decision systems; and exploring the construction of smart ranches,encouraging the development of industry-specific models for livestock and veterinary applications and intelligent robots for the industry.
The timetable sits in another document: the Ministry’s Digital Livestock Action Plan (2025-2027) specifies that by the end of 2026,monitoring equipment will achieve 100% coverage in national-level standardized livestock and poultry demonstration farms.
Real cases are already visible. In September this year, at a smart pig farming demonstration base in Rongchang,Chongqing, 5G smart ear tags were monitoring vital signs in real time, AI pig-recognition cameras were measuring body length,rail-mounted inspection robots were working back and forth above the pens,and automatic feeders were dispensing feed according to algorithms; millisecond-level data on temperature,humidity, ammonia concentration, water pressure and air speed in the pens was analyzed locally and sent straight to the fans and feeding lines.More crucial is the second half — using blockchain to build a full life-cycle “digital file” for each pig,compiling data across farming, slaughter, trading and consumption into one transparent account,so that consumers can scan a traceability code to see the breeding source, feed formula and quarantine certificates.In September, Rongchang District also issued the Rongchang Pig Whole-Chain Digital Traceability Management Specification,turning “scan the code and know the whole journey” into a local management standard.
The weak link of a data chain is usually at its end
In the same document,the plan also states that it will “implement electronic issuance of meat inspection certificates and regulate the disposal of non-conforming products at the slaughter stage,”and requires “fully implementing online quarantine declaration and electronic certification.” In other words, the slaughter end is also catching up on data.
But the credibility of a data chain is not judged by its longest segment — it is judged by the shortest one.Sensors on farms can upload automatically, and quarantine certificates can be issued electronically;yet when it comes to the treatment of slaughter by-products and diseased and dead livestock and poultry, in many places it is still paper ledgers,manual meter reading and retrospective entry. How much was treated, at what sterilization temperature, for how long,and where the products went — if these parameters are filled in from memory, the data chain breaks exactly here.
And this segment is precisely where trustworthy data matters most: it determines whether the disease-control loop can be closed, and whether the flow of by-products can be traced.
Traceability presupposes that the equipment can speak for itself
In the end, digitalization is not a contest of screens but of data sources.
Where should the data of the treatment stage come from? The most reliable way is to let the equipment generate it itself: feed intake, sterilization temperature, pressure,duration and the destination of the output — recorded, exported and logged by the equipment,not filled in by people. Only when these parameters are “spoken” by the equipment is the end of the chain truly connected.
This is precisely what Hebei Chengzhu Machinery Group is doing: transforming the temperature, pressure, and duration involved in processes—such as whole-body crushing, high-temperature and high-pressure sterilization (at 180°C), drying, and degreasing—into automatically collected, traceable parameters. This ensures that the processing stage does more than just dispose of materials; it generates records that can withstand verification. With AI already diagnosing illnesses in pigs at the farming stage and quarantine certificates being issued electronically at the slaughtering stage, the final missing link in this data chain is the self-verifying data generated by the processing equipment itself.
Blog · 10 月 14, 2026 From Smart Ear Tags to Processing Records: The Data Chain the “15th Five-Year” Livestock Plan Wants to Connect Read More
