On the occasion of the World Dairy Industry Conference held in Hohhot from August 4 to 7, the latest ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance, or Environmental, Social and Governance) rating results announced by Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI for short), an authoritative international indexing agency, showed that Youran Animal Husbandry (09858) received a BB rating for the first time. This is also the current MSCI ESG rating of China's dairy industry upstream The highest level.
According to reports, the MSCI ESG rating is currently an important standard for global investors to measure the development sustainability and sense of social responsibility of listed companies. With its authority, objectivity, impartiality and practicality, it is currently the most mainstream investment reference basis in international capital markets.
Data shows that Youran Animal Husbandry regards ESG as part of the company's core competitiveness and has risen to a strategic level. From strengthening top-level design and building a complete ESG system, to leveraging technological advantages to lead the industry's green and low-carbon transformation, digital intelligence empowers efficiency and sustainability, breeding technology to help protect biodiversity, and protecting consumer nutrition and health with high-quality specialty fresh milk, this leading dairy industry enterprise has become a new sample for the industry to promote ESG practices.
Give full play to the technical advantages of the “Animal Husbandry Technology Group” to build a green and low-carbon “leader” in the upper reaches of the dairy industry
Green and low carbon is the core proposition of ESG work. As a leading upstream enterprise in the dairy industry, Youran Animal Husbandry's business completely covers the entire “seed industry, grass industry, feed, dairy breeding, and industrial chain trading center” in the upper reaches of the dairy industry. Green and low-carbon initiatives run through all businesses, forming a carbon reduction system for the entire industry chain.
In terms of breeding, Youran Animal Husbandry uses its own dairy breeding techniques to cultivate low-carbon, high-yielding, and long-lived “super cows.” Secoxing, a subsidiary of Youran Animal Husbandry, is the largest dairy breeding company in China. It cultivates a low-carbon core group of cows by carrying out research on important genes or molecular markers related to carbon emissions such as methane in the whole genome data of dairy cows. It is worth noting that Secco Star is also the first company in China to use Greenfeed equipment to monitor carbon emissions, and can efficiently screen low-carbon breeding cows.
In terms of developing low-carbon feed, as the largest producer of ruminant feed in China, Youran Animal Husbandry has explored and developed key healthy, low-carbon farming techniques such as energy and nitrogen balance technology and enzymatic engineering nutritional regulation technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from dairy cows by increasing feed conversion rates.
In terms of developing green electricity, Youran Animal Husbandry makes full use of photovoltaics and biogas resources to develop green electricity, so that all ranches can use green electricity. At present, Youran Animal Husbandry has introduced a “complementary herding” model in several new construction projects to achieve a green economy of “roof photovoltaics, raising cattle in sheds”. At the same time, it can also effectively insulate, reduce the temperature of the barn, improve the comfort of dairy cows, and solve 40% of the electricity consumption of ranch operations. Youran Animal Husbandry has also deployed a biogas power generation project from the back end. A 10,000 head ranch produces about 6.25 million cubic meters of biogas per year, achieving full power generation. The annual power generation capacity can reach 11.5 million kilowatts, which can solve 60% of the electricity consumption of ranch operations, and photovoltaic power generation satisfies the total electricity consumption of the ranch, so the ranch can fully use green electricity.
In addition, “cultivation integration”, which turns waste into waste to create ecologically circular agriculture, is also a powerful measure for excellent animal husbandry to reduce carbon and increase efficiency and promote the green and low-carbon development of the industry. Youran Animal Husbandry has independently developed a fully mixed biogas anaerobic fermentation process and a fully automatic intelligent aerobic fermentation process. Manure is automatically controlled and treated from collection, mixing, solid-liquid separation and fermentation. The system can recycle all the gas produced by fermentation, achieve a deodorizing effect, and achieve low carbon emissions through full generation of biogas. However, after being treated harmlessly, the solid part is backfilled with bed bedding, and the liquid part is made from organic fertilizer and returned to the field, effectively improving soil fertility and providing sufficient resource guarantees for high-quality forage cultivation.
While leveraging its technical advantages, Youran Animal Husbandry is also actively cooperating with authorities to jointly promote green and low-carbon development through the deep integration of industry, education and research. Youran Animal Husbandry cooperated with the Institute of Agricultural Environment and Sustainable Development of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Beijing Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences to undertake the Ministry of Science and Technology and the local “Research and Application of Comprehensive Technology for Carbon Neutralization and Carbon Emission Reduction in Large-scale Ranch Farming”, “Construction of a Carbon Emission Monitoring and Early Warning Platform for Dairy Farming and Demonstration Application of the Low-Carbon Emission Reduction Circular Farming Model” to carry out low-carbon emission reduction research to promote carbon neutrality in dairy farming.
Meanwhile, during the 14th China Dairy Industry Conference, Yunan Animal Husbandry also signed separate “strategic cooperation agreements” with the Beijing Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine, the Feed Research Institute, and the Grassland Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The cooperation includes research on low-carbon farming of dairy cows and development of low-carbon feed.
In addition, Younran Ranch is also vigorously introducing new technology and equipment such as electric vehicles and air source heat pumps. In 2022, the Royal River Ecological Smart Ranch electric raw milk transporter will be put into use first in the industry. Through power electrification, the transformation of the energy structure will be accelerated, “zero carbon ranching” will gradually be achieved, and the pace of “carbon neutrality” will be accelerated.
Royal River Ecological Smart Farm Electric Raw Milk Transport Truck
Leading breeding technology provides technical support for biodiversity conservation
Biodiversity loss is seen as one of the rapidly worsening global risks over the next decade. Many ESG rating systems, including MSCI ESG, have used biodiversity as one of the key indicators. With the advantages of leading breeding technology, Youran Animal Husbandry is contributing to the sustainable development of species and ecosystems.
According to information, Youran Animal Husbandry has established an efficient cloning technology system for animals including cows, deer, dairy goats, etc., to provide professional technical support for protecting animal biodiversity and germplasm resources on the Inner Mongolia Plateau. The Secoxing Research Institute of Youran Animal Husbandry cooperated with Inner Mongolia University to establish a germplasm resource bank, and has collected 168 resources from livestock and wild animal breeds such as cows, sheep, horses, etc. unique to the Mongolian plateau region, with strong adaptability and obvious resistance to disease and stress resistance, and more than 30,000 resource samples (including cells, semen, embryos, etc.).
At the same time, Youran Animal Husbandry also focused on collecting and breeding more than 20 endemic livestock breeds, including Mongolian cows, Mongolian sheep, and Mongolian horses, and carrying out relevant genetic and breeding application research. Based on the development of new techniques for efficient cloning of livestock, later Yunan Animal Husbandry will use modern biological breeding techniques such as stem cell gene editing and clonal breeding to innovate and cultivate new dairy cattle lines with specific production performance, disease resistance and stress resistance, and the ability to adapt to specific environments, and provide basic genetic material materials and key technical support to protect the biodiversity of the region.
Digitally intelligent “needle threading” improves overall efficiency and sustainability
In addition to using technology to help enterprises implement ESG, Youran Animal Husbandry also uses digital intelligence to “thread the needle” to organically connect all links in the entire industry chain “from one grass to one cup of milk” to open up the five major business segments of breeding, grassland, feed, dairy farming, and e-commerce platforms in agglomeration, leading the digital transformation of the animal husbandry industry and comprehensively improving production and operation efficiency and sustainability.
Among them, the most notable is the Royal River Ecological Smart Ranch, the most intelligent green low-carbon tourist ranch in the world built by Youran Animal Husbandry, and introduced the world's most advanced intelligent equipment, including fully intelligent unmanned milking robots, feeding robots, feed robots, manure cleaning robots, etc., leading the industry into the “unmanned cattle raising” era.
Through intelligent equipment and management systems, the intelligent barn of Royal River Ecological Smart Ranch has greatly increased the yield, yield and quality of dairy cows, improved the efficiency and sustainability of dairy farming, and also reduced labor, feed, water and electricity costs. According to data, under this model, the yield of dairy cows can be increased by more than 10%, the estrus detection rate can be increased by 15% to 20%, the breeding rate can be increased by 10% to 15%, and accurate spraying is expected to save 40% of water consumption per year.
Furthermore, as a representative of Youran Animal Husbandry's new large-scale and intelligent ranch, Wuwei Ranch achieved a landmark breakthrough in the Chinese dairy farming industry with a yield of over 49 kg in the second year of operation under lean operation and digital power, and was certified as “the ranch with the highest milk production volume of Chinese dairy cows in a single day”, making it the ranch with the highest yield of dairy cows in China.
Build an innovative model for R&D and production of specialty fresh milk to protect the nutritional health of consumers from the source of dairy products
As a leading upstream enterprise in the dairy industry, Youran Animal Husbandry has created a collaborative business model for the entire industry chain to achieve a virtuous cycle of “growing good cows, good food to raise cows, and good cows to produce good milk” and continuously improving the quality of raw milk. And Youran Animal Husbandry's control of quality from the source is also one of the important reasons why it has obtained the highest rating in the MSCI ESG industry.
Over the years, Youran Animal Husbandry has continued to develop and produce high-quality, high-nutritional fresh milk to protect the quality, nutrition and health of dairy products from the source. The nutritional hygiene indicators of raw milk are far higher than European and American standards.
In response to the growing diversified nutritional and health needs of consumers, Yunan Animal Husbandry successfully constructed an “innovative model for R&D and production of high-value-added specialty fresh milk” to promote the development of dairy product categories towards specialization, high-end and refined refinement through population segmentation, functional segmentation, and scenario segmentation, and develops and produces fresh milk with nutritional, health, characteristics and functional characteristics. Take DHA, known as the “gold of the brain,” as an example. Through research on the metabolic mechanism of DHA in dairy cows, combined with encapsulation technology, DHA can produce functional milk rich in DHA after efficient digestion, absorption, and utilization in the cow's back intestines.
After years of intensive R&D and market practice, Younan Animal Husbandry has become the largest specialty fresh milk supplier in China, producing a variety of specialty fresh milk such as organic, organic A2, juanshan, organic juanshan, A2, native DHA, and native selenium-enriched raw milk.
Facing the future, Youran Animal Husbandry said it will continue to adhere to the organic integration of commercial value and social value, continue to make full use of the technical advantages of the Animal Husbandry Technology Group to promote the low-carbon and environmentally friendly development of the whole industry and help revitalize the dairy industry. At the same time, it will also protect people's health with more high-quality and nutritious fresh milk products and promote the high-quality and sustainable development of the industry.