Website serves up online pig portal for food safety

Faced with a food industry hit by health scares, leading Chinese information and game portal Netease.com is going the whole hog - by raising pigs and documenting the porkers' journey from farm to fork for all the online world to see.

The IT firm will start by rearing up to 10,000 swine in farms in Zhejiang province, where the animals will be raised in a "pastoral environment and fed strictly on an organic diet", Netease founder and CEO William Ding said.

The first batch of pigs will reportedly be made up of select black hogs from Japan's Kagoshima prefecture, where swine are highly prized for their quality. Consumers will be able to track the lives of the pigs online, including what they eat and when they relieve themselves, Netease said. Pig farmers will also be able to exchange breeding tips, it said.