Eighty cows ride one of eight merry-go-round milking parlors in the Modern Dairy’s Bengbu Farm in China’s Anhui Province, one of the largest dairies in the world. Though traditionally a country of small farmers, China has embraced vertical integration and economies of scale in agriculture. Bengbu has nearly 40,000 cows, while its parent company, Modern Dairy, has nearly 230,000 cows on 26 farms, and 25 square miles for growing alfalfa to feed them (although when this photograph was taken, Steinmetz was told much of Bengbu Farm’s alfalfa was being imported from Utah). In the automated Modern Dairy, cows enter one end of the processing facility, are milked on one of the parlors, and packages of milk, yogurt, and other dairy products roll out the other end a few hours later. In 2020 the 25 largest dairy companies in China were responsible for 30 percent of the nation’s production. Modern Dairy’s five-year plan, published in 2020, was to double the size of its herd by 2025 to a half million dairy cows.
