How is Netease CEO Ding Lei’s pig farm now?

For all pig-related people in the country, the past year has been a year of anxiety. Because of the fact that in the case of raising pigs, Ding Lei has placed a strong technical ambition, Netease's pig farm has received much attention. Buying tech black pigs at Netease Koala is the most fashionable topic in the Internet circle three years ago. But on September 6, 2019, NetEase Koala was acquired by Alibaba for $2 billion. In this increasingly uncertain time period, the development of the story is always unexpected.

Netease pig farm finally made a sound. On the 10th of September, NetEase Weifang released the latest push through the official micro-signal and shared four news. The first one is about the price of pork - "Netease's black pork price has stabilized." Ding Lei probably did not think that in just a few years into the pig industry, Netease pig farm began to deal with the collective crisis of an industry. . On August 23, 2018, when the swine fever spread to Wenzhou area, 370 km away, Netease pig farm was in the middle of Anji County, Zhejiang Province. All the farms and slaughterhouses in the county were called to the County Animal Husbandry Bureau for training. Xu Da, the deputy director, demanded that the pigs should be kept “every line of defense”.

Anji is not a big pig county, but on the same day, in the county administrative command center Room 506, the county animal disease prevention and control headquarters also began to deploy, which shows the importance and urgency of this matter. The Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau organized personnel to conduct a thorough investigation of the 36 pig breeding scales and three slaughterhouses in the county. From August 8th, the livestock managers of 15 townships began to arrange. Inspections are becoming more frequent, and all links are required to be “strictly guarded”. Checkpoints, hanging banners, and installation of lighting facilities were set up at 13 intersections in Anhui. Township cadres, responsible persons and duty officers began to operate on a 24-hour basis.

In the Laoshan Township where Netease Weiyang pigs are located, most of the land remains in the original bamboo forest, chestnut forest, tea garden and other vegetation. This may be a barrier for black pigs to avoid external pathogens and pollution. The pig farm is not accessible in a Baidu map: In early September, I started from the center of the county and drove 13 kilometers. The road was narrowed by width, and the height and density of the houses on both sides were getting lower and lower. After a field of land, The pool, in the depth of more than one meter of grass is deep, Netease Weiyang pig farm appeared at the end of the road.

A black fence iron gate, very inconspicuous, a guard room at the door. Seeing my visit, a security guard walked out the door. "This is not a place to visit." He refused to speak harshly and skillfully. The door is facing a white wall. A small road extends from the front of the wall to the two sides. The real park has to go a long way to see: the height of the pig house and the inclination of the roof are 20 degrees. The white board room and the black roof are simple in design. The pig house has a small footprint in the park and most of it is covered by green plants. In addition to the tea garden, there are cultivated land, plants for pigs and vegetables for employees.

More information about the inside of the farm has been stopped in 2017. In the past, people who were invited to visit would be required to wear protective clothing and enter the breeding area through closed disinfection of the ultrasonic atomization disinfection channel. On the side of the disinfection channel, there is a bathroom. The technicians in the breeding area need to take a bath before going to work every day. It now appears that these measures are extremely important for a farm. For pig farms of all sizes in the country, the past year has been an year of anxiety.

This is not the first test. Just in 2009, Ding Lei just announced the raising of swine flu in Shandong Province. The opening situation is not good. Later, Ding Lei recalled that a friend advised him, "Hurry up and find a step down." Ding Lei said: "Crossing, I believe Chinese people still have to eat pork." He is passionate about raising pigs and releases a lot of rhetoric: Netease plans The whole process of raising pigs is put on the website for live broadcast. After the consumers buy pork, they can find out how the pig was raised on the Internet. Not live broadcast, it is 2017, after a few years of silence, Ding Lei raised pigs into the most familiar publicity track of Netease: March 22, that year, Netease and piglet short-term rental cooperation, to 1 yuan price Open two Netease pig farm staff quarters to test the quota. A week later, Ding Lei invited financial writer Wu Xiaobo to live on the Netease pig farm. In an interview for more than one hour, Ding Lei asked Wu Xiaobo to taste the biscuits and bread made from raw materials of pig food. He also emphasized that the water treated by the purification of pig waste can be directly processed. drink.

But now, even an ordinary farm of the same size will not easily allow outsiders to enter: bacteria may be hidden in unexpected places. Knowing that the second day of the piglet transmission into the country, the management of the Suifeng farm immediately could not sit still, and decided to close the farm from now on. The people inside would not give up, and the outsiders would not allow it. Don't even think about visiting customers – all outsiders are not welcomed by the farm. Even customers who choose piglets on the farm are allowed to enter the door after they ask for strong demand, but they only watch the scales by monitoring (before entering the guard room) Customers should wash their hair, bathe and change clothes in the bathroom. All their belongings should be sterilized by ultraviolet disinfection for 30 minutes, and then put into a ziplock bag, which is not allowed in the whole process).

Pig carts that travel through farms and slaughterhouses are the biggest source of hidden danger. Before 2018, the pig car can enter and exit at will. After starting the emergency plan, the car entering the farm will be disinfected 6 times. The first disinfection point is located 10 kilometers away from the farm.

Even so, the technical director of the farm, Liao Zhenghe, was still uneasy. He told me that he couldn’t sleep at all: just about 7,000 words were written for prevention and control, and disinfection became a top priority. This is an invisible war. The closure began on the last day of August last year and continued until June of this year. For the entire 11 months, the employees of the farm did not leave the farm except for the departure. The requirements for visiting Netease pig farms have always been strict. Liao Zhenghe’s friend Wang Ruinian visited the country two years ago. He has been in business for more than ten years, and the university is studying pig breeding, specializing in pork quality. At that time, the boss of a feed company in Fujian Province, through some relationships, won the investigation of the Netease Weiyang pig farm, and led the contact with several well-known pig farm owners, feed company owners and pig-raising companies in Fujian Province.

Netease Agriculture CEO Ni Jinde has long waited at the entrance of the farm. The park covers an area of 1200 acres, and the farm is completed by the School of Design of Tsinghua University: the team's previous work is the Antarctic scientific research station - Wang Ruinian recalled that his most touched details are the staff quarters of Netease Pig Farm. The house is made up of containers, double standard room, one floor is a restaurant, the second floor is a person, and a floor-to-ceiling window is facing the farm. “I feel so good.” But even then, the delegation was not It is allowed to enter the pig house, and only the chief scientist of the pig raising in Fujian Province has entered them on their behalf.

For Wang Ruinian, many places in the Netease pig farm called him curious. The Internet giant established the Agricultural Division, with only a few core employees, but has been on an equal footing with the NetEase Mailbox Division and the Games Division. The office of the Agriculture Department in Netease Hangzhou is next door to Ding Lei, and the entire department has also been given high hopes by Ding Lei. Inside Netease, ordinary employees can also feel the boss's emphasis on pork. At that time, Netease had a user who broke 500 million. One of the team rewards decided by Ding Lei was the subscription ticket for Netease Pork. In order to inspect pigs, the heads of Netease Agriculture at the time, Mao Shan and Zhou Wei, spent two years visiting the world's domestic and foreign aquaculture companies, and also invited experts from Europe and the United States directly to inspect. For example, in order to train pigs to learn to go to the toilet, Maoshan and Zhou Wei went to the Hangzhou Zoo and asked the head of the circus.

They heard that the circus had performed a pig training program in the Spring Festival of the Year of the Pig and wanted to find an actor who would train the pig and learn to let the pig obey. When they arrived, the actor who tamed the pig had left to work outside. The two people are not too reconciled, and asked, when the pigs are performing, is it a whistle or a direct password? The head of the circus answered that it was a password. "Running," "jumping," and "around the past" were all spoken. About these black pigs, various versions of the story float in the Internet world. Netease's own propaganda said that Netease's pigs will not only go to the toilet, but also have their own Netease cloud music song list. The daily food standard is 40 yuan for a pig. The staff also needs to interact with the pig every day to ensure the good mood of the pig.

Wang Ruinian is most interested in the pigs on the toilet. According to the news at the time, the excrement "was washed away like a flush toilet, left a little bit of flavor, and applied for a patent." He was very curious, the pig's droppings were a huge problem. According to the average level, an adult pig will excrete 2.2 kilograms of feces every day. When Wang Ruinian University completed the graduation thesis, he worked as a breeder in a rural private pig farm under the jurisdiction of Shenyang City. The daily work is completely around the pig. Feces come. At that visit, the puzzle was finally solved. The pig house is not covered on site. It is assembled in the assembly workshop for various steel prefabricated frames and then shipped to Anji for on-site assembly. The pig house has an overhead floor that does not land directly. This design is like a steel toilet on a motor train. The pig is quickly drained after it is drained. The principle is not difficult. "There is no deepest place to go. Everyone knows the truth." Wang Ruinian thinks that as far as propaganda is concerned, the pig's manure can be directly consumed after being treated. "This is not difficult, it depends on your investment. Not big."

However, Netease's entire process of raising pigs is still full of twists and turns. Every once in a while, Ding Lei’s raising pigs will be questioned. A few large-scale pig farm owners in Northeast China directly regarded Netease pig farms as “a bet that must fail”. In their view, Ding Lei’s behavior is more like “a big play ticket”. Almost every year, there are articles to ask questions - how is Ding Lei’s pigs raised? The progress is very slow. Anji’s farm was completed at the end of 2012. It is only in 2015 that the high-profile Netease pork will be unveiled for the first time. The way of appearance was arranged very "gorgeous": during the second Internet conference, Ding Lei took a meal in Wuzhen and invited the most popular Internet savvy in China to taste Netease pork. In the photo, Li Yanhong, Zhang Chaoyang, Liang Jianzhang and other Internet giants gathered at a table.

Raising pigs is not something that can be done with ambition and wealth. The entire pig chain is very long, from the selection of pig feed, ratio, pig body immunization, feeding process to sales, slaughter, processing, learning everywhere. It is much harder than imagined to quickly shake a traditional large plate. During this period, the Netease Agricultural Entrepreneur trio was dispersed. Ding Lei said that the original intention of the project was "public interest disclosure." In an interview with Ding Lei in Netease Technology, Ding Lei particularly emphasized that pig raising is a company behavior of NetEase. It is not an investment, but an experimental one. jobs. In the previous interview, Maoshan’s understanding of Netease’s agriculture was “pursuit of profitability”, “it is to sell products, not to do charity.”

Wang Ruinian can understand Maoshan's choice. "A person who manages a group company, let you manage two small pig factories. That means there is a gap for everyone. Just kill the pig with a knife, and externally pack more Internet labels. In essence, it is still raising pigs." In 2015, NetEase Agriculture issued an open letter to respond to the controversy over the years. The letter said: We did overestimate ourselves and overestimated the problems faced in raising pigs. Agriculture is really a new field for Netease, and complex supply chain management is indeed not a long-term project of Internet companies. Our footsteps are not fast enough, but we believe that the cause may be fruitful, the fruit may come a bit late, but it must be sweeter than the others. It’s time to turn it over, and the last sentence of the letter says this.

If it is just ordinary pig raising, it may not be so difficult to produce. The problem is that Ding Lei has placed a strong technical ambition on this matter. When describing his vision for Netease pig raising, Ding Lei used an analogy - he hopes to put the open-source Linux thinking in the computer field on pigs. "Linux is open and free. We use the Internet to disclose the entire process and data of pig raising. Let's participate together, share it together, improve it together, and make the production model more efficient." Ding Lei is typical. Born in technology, his father was an engineer at a scientific research institution in Ningbo. When he was a child, Ding Lei was influenced by his father. In 1997, Ding Lei used his own money written by software for several years to establish Netease in Guangzhou.

Until November 25, 2016, Netease Black Pork, which had not been officially sold, was auctioned for the first time on Netease Koala. According to reports at the time, at 10:00 on the same day, the user bid exceeded 1,000 yuan on the page, and after one minute, the price exceeded 5000. Next, the user constantly grabbed and went out, and the price soared. After 11 minutes of shooting, the price of the whole pig exceeded 10,000. As of 18:00, the price exceeded 100,000. In the end, after more than 60 bids, an anonymous buyer took Netease's first whole pig at a price of 110,000. The next day, on November 26, the second black pig was taken away by Wu Guoping, the founder of the grandmother's family. On the third day, a 42-kilogram black pig was taken down by 270,000. Buying tech black pigs at the koala price is still the most fashionable topic in the Internet circle at the end of the year. But on September 6 this year, NetEase Koala has been acquired by Alibaba for $2 billion.

The pig food formula of NetEase pig farm was also exposed, and the price was 40% higher than the industry average. Then, Netease Cloud Music launched the exclusive song list of Dingjia Pig, named "Netease Weiyang Black Pig Cosmic Album", exclusive music including: get up, eat, sleep, snack and pure music under the feeding scene.

"Our piglet toilet, sleeping apartment, no injection, no medicine, living habits are healthier than many people. Usually eat Netease exclusive feed, is a scientific formula provided by international nutritionists combined with domestic experts. In addition to being Eat it, be a pig in Netease, may be more happy than the panda." Ding Lei said in the column. Netease's Hangzhou and Beijing headquarters all have Weiyang pig sales stalls. Beijing is located on the ground floor of the company. Pork is only equipped with a freezer. In the Kerry Center of Fengqi Road, one of the most prosperous business districts in Hangzhou, the pork restaurant “Pig Dad” founded by Netease and Grandma's family became a net red shop. On September 6th, I visited the pig dad restaurant in the Kerry Center during the meal time. The people in the queue were full outside the door, and the average waited for nearly 30 minutes. On the big screen of the doorway, the Netease Weiyang pig farm propaganda film was broadcasted on the big screen. The film constantly emphasized that the pigs love to be clean and grow up listening to music every day.

Outside the isolated farm, the price of the hog market is experiencing fluctuations. For a number of reasons, the hog gap in the market has been created. According to the public data of the National Bureau of Statistics, pork prices rose by 46.7% year-on-year in August this year. In the first week of September 2019, the average price of pork in the country reached 40.54 yuan a kilogram. But for NetEase pork, this price is still very cheap. Since its inception, it has been a high-end route. The price of NetEase Weiyang Tmall store shows that the lowest price of frozen boiled bone, 110 yuan a kilogram. The most expensive black pork ribs, 235 yuan a kilogram.