Mengcheng Yellow Cattle enjoys a regional public brand value of 500 million yuan, yet a dispute involving a village-level cattle farmer has exposed inconsistent reporting standards for local cattle farming data, along with the gap between official ledgers and on-the-ground reality, raising questions about the true scale of this local specialty agricultural product.
Two conflicting accounts of a village clash
On the evening of July 28, 2026, Xu Langzi, a farmer in Liming Village, Licang Town, Mengcheng County, Anhui Province, called police, alleging he had been beaten by village officials at the village committee office. The two sides give completely opposite accounts of what triggered the incident and how it unfolded. According to Xu, that morning village officials demanded he inflate his actual herd of 20 yellow cattle to 50 for reporting purposes; when he refused on the spot, they verbally banned him from continuing to raise cattle. Upset, Xu tethered one of his cattle at the gate of the village committee, and the two sides later agreed via WeChat to meet at the village office to talk things over. When they met that evening, a physical altercation broke out. Xu says he was kicked to the ground repeatedly and never fought back. The village official involved offers a different explanation. He says that day he was assisting with a higher-level survey of yellow cattle farming and called Xu about environmental remediation at his farm, but Xu misunderstood and resisted. He says he merely told Xu that the farm could not continue operating if it failed environmental standards, and did not deliberately pressure him. Xu then brought a cow to the village committee to make trouble, and police came to the scene and persuaded him to leave. The official says he later took the initiative to invite Xu to mediate, and that during the evening discussion the two merely grappled, with no beating, something other village officials present can attest to. Because the village committee's surveillance equipment was broken, there is no video evidence of the scene, and the two accounts differ substantially, so the facts still require police investigation.
The dispute over scaled farming
At the heart of the dispute is the chaotic way local authorities determine whether yellow cattle farming qualifies as scaled. Industry standards are clear: annual slaughter of 50 or more beef cattle counts as scaled farming. Village officials argue that Xu's farm, which held 70 to 80 head at its peak, met the scaled-farming threshold, and that even as his herd shrank in recent years, it remained on the scaled-farming ledger. Xu rejects this. His barn measures 25 meters by 10 meters, with a maximum design capacity of just 36 head, making it impossible to hold 50. Only in 2023, when the local government rolled out a "insurance plus credit" live-animal mortgage policy, did he ever fill the barn to capacity, and he never applied for scaled-farming status, yet was inexplicably placed on the scaled-farming supervision list. Industry insiders calculate that given the barn's actual footprint, the hardware simply cannot support 50 head, meaning the official scaled-farming designation is sharply at odds with reality. Compared with ordinary smallholders, scaled farms must meet stricter standards for site conditions, facilities, disease prevention and environmental remediation. Xu says that to comply with scaled-farming requirements he has invested 40,000 yuan in upgrades in recent years, but profits are thin, his herd now stands at just 20 head, and he is burdened long-term with the false label of "scaled" farming and high remediation costs, leaving him under enormous operating pressure.
A cross-section of cattle farming in Liming Village
Discrepancies in village-level farming data are widespread. Village officials report Liming Village's yellow cattle inventory at close to 200 head, while Xu's door-to-door count found actual stocks of no more than 140. Records show eight registered cattle farming enterprises in Liming Village, six still active and two deregistered. Of the six active firms, two exist in name only: one registered in 2021 with 3 million yuan in registered capital stopped farming in 2023 after its person in charge died unexpectedly; another, newly registered in March 2026, has an owner who has moved to another province and conducts no actual farming. Among the remaining genuine operators, apart from Xu's 20 head, the other three hold fewer than 20, 30 and 40 head respectively. The two deregistered firms are equally suspicious: one still keeps a handful of cattle, fewer than 20 head, after deregistration; the other, registered in 2023 and deregistered in 2025, was set up using someone else's identity, and its legal representative has only one genuine farm with 100,000 yuan in registered capital. In 2024, this shell company was even promoted by the media as a model farm, with photos and on-camera personnel that did not match the actual entity. The village's remaining farmers are scattered elderly residents, each raising no more than two head. Overall, all three of the village's 3-million-yuan-scale farming enterprises have exited, and the surviving entities have registered capital of at most 100,000 yuan and as little as 20,000 yuan, with no genuinely scaled operation.
An explosion in registered firms, with shell companies standing out
The artificial boom in Liming Village mirrors the cattle industry across Licang Town and Mengcheng County. Licang Town, a key beef cattle farming town locally, has seen a surge in farming enterprises in recent years. Qichacha data shows 174 cattle-related firms in the town, with 50 added in 2023, and 128 currently active. But 2025 annual reports show that of the 128 active firms, only three have normal social insurance enrollment, with just five insured employees in total, including only three at a top-ten municipal farming enterprise, while a firm with 40 million yuan in registered capital has zero insured employees, a severe shell-company problem. Across the county, Mengcheng has 1,091 cattle farming firms, of which 808 are active. In 2023 and 2024 alone, 619 were added, more than half of all new registrations over the years. Yet 2025 data shows only 13 active firms countywide have social insurance enrollment, with 34 insured employees in total, a serious disconnect between the number of firms and the actual scale of the industry. Farmers say the clustering of registrations stems from the 2023 local beef cattle revitalization support policy. That year's industrial plan and support measures introduced generous insurance subsidies and low-interest live-animal mortgage loans, greatly stimulating registration enthusiasm and prompting a wave of shell companies.
Five conflicting data sets for beef cattle farming
The proliferation of shell companies and weak actual farming have directly produced chaotic official data and contradictory brand valuations. In August 2025, Mengcheng Yellow Cattle was named a national famous, specialty and new agricultural product, with a brand value of 500 million yuan; by the end of that year, the regional public brand was valued at 12.876 billion yuan, a 25-fold difference in just four months, highlighting the data chaos. Town-level figures are similarly distorted. Licang Town reported 15,800 beef cattle slaughtered in 2024, 58% of the county total published by the statistics bureau, yet the town's active firms account for only 15.8% of the county's, a severe imbalance between industrial input and output. Reviewing five official and promotional channels since 2022, Mengcheng's beef cattle industry coexists with five conflicting data sets: the county statistics bureau: 19,700 head slaughtered in 2022, 20,100 in 2023, and 27,200 in 2024; the county agriculture and rural affairs bureau: 32,000 head on hand and 28,000 slaughtered in 2023, a projected 63,000 on hand and 58,000 slaughtered in 2024, and a farming scale of 140,200 head in 2025; the county government work report: a farming scale of 80,000 head in 2023 and 155,000 in 2024; the county agricultural modernization plan: annual beef cattle slaughter of 65,000 head by 2025; and media promotion: a farming scale of 200,000 head, 92,000 slaughtered and 5 billion yuan in full-industry-chain output value by the end of 2025. The gaps between these categories widen year by year, with the 2024 slaughter figures from the statistics and agriculture departments differing by more than twofold. Nationally, the normal beef cattle slaughter rate is stable at 48% to 53%, yet under the agriculture bureau's figures, Mengcheng's rate was 87.5% in 2023 and 92.1% in 2024, far exceeding the normal physiological cycle and clearly distorted. The only media figure with a reasonable ratio happens to match the 2025 target set officially in 2023, suggesting planned figures were substituted for actual capacity.
A 640 million yuan upgrade project sharply scaled back
To support upgrading of the cattle industry, Mengcheng once launched a yellow cattle improvement project (phase one) with total investment of 640 million yuan, covering 1,420 mu and designed to raise 50,000 head a year, across the three townships of Licang, Banqiao and Letu. The Licang base covers 150 mu with 80 million yuan invested, approved environmentally for 2,500 head on hand and 5,000 slaughtered annually; the Letu base covers 210 mu with 70 million yuan invested and a planned annual slaughter of 6,000 head. Actual implementation has shrunk severely: the Letu base has shown no sign of construction since approval, and the thousand-mu plot in Banqiao Town has no publicly disclosed approval documents. The two implemented bases fall far short of the original plan in both land area and farming scale. The project was built by a county-owned state enterprise, with a contract period of 1,095 days that has now expired. Only the Licang base is complete, at a cost of 44.3323 million yuan, with just five of eight planned barns built, and it was once penalized for environmental violations over construction without approval, greatly undercutting the results of a major industrial project.
A 7 billion yuan flagship project falls almost silent
Beyond basic farming projects, Mengcheng once planned a 7 billion yuan high-end beef cattle smart low-carbon industrial park, covering 100,000 head of farming plus slaughtering and deep processing across the full chain, with projected annual output value of 6 billion yuan and more than 4,000 jobs, a flagship industrial project for the locality. The project ran into obstacles: in August 2024, a major adjustment terminated supervision bidding, and after re-tendering the project shrank directly to 1 billion yuan, with farming scale cut to 60,000 head. The winning bidder was a consortium of three local county-owned state enterprises plus an out-of-town design firm. After the winning bid was announced, the project saw no further progress and fell completely silent, turning a grand industrial plan into a paper proposal.