Giving fresh impetus to green development across northern frontier
In autumn, herder Aodu in Sonid Right Banner, west of the Xiliin Gol grassland in Inner Mongolia autonomous region, is driving the last batch of sheep onto a freight truck. Each sheep wears a small electronic traceability tag between its ears — an exclusive "electronic ID" issued under the "Meng" brand certification system for Sonid sheep.
The sheep is destined for Beijing, Henan province and other places by air-conditioned transport, where it will be sold in some high-end supermarkets at prices nearly 20 percent higher than those of ordinary free-range lamb.
Behind the small ear tag lies a complete industrial chain encompassing standardized breeding, brand certification and cold-chain logistics. It is also a vivid example of how Inner Mongolia's green and organic agricultural and livestock brands are making their way into markets across the country.
This picture of rising incomes did not emerge overnight. Inner Mongolia is endowed with exceptional ecological resources, which should be a core competitive advantage for its agriculture and animal husbandry. For a long time, however, the region struggled to turn its high-quality agricultural and livestock products into stable market returns.
On the production side, operators were fragmented, while progress in standardized farming and animal husbandry and the development of green production bases lagged behind. On the branding side, numerous small brands competed in an overcrowded market, with serious product homogeneity.
On the market side, there were too few warehousing and exhibition outlets nationwide, while long-distance cold-chain transportation remained costly. On the safeguards side, full-process traceability and market-access mechanisms for green production were underdeveloped, leaving gaps in quality control from pasture and farm to the dining table.
Against this backdrop, building on its strategic role as a major national production base for agricultural and livestock products, Inner Mongolia has rolled out a series of interconnected policy measures to strengthen production standardization, integrate branding, expand marketing networks nationwide and establish long-term quality safeguards.
A modern agricultural and animal husbandry industry system that combines sustained income growth for farmers and herders with green, sustainable development is taking shape at a faster pace. A major hub for green and organic agricultural and livestock brands is steadily emerging in northern China.
Ensuring quality products command high prices
In Jalaid Banner, Hinggan League, clear streams flow through the fields, while the region's pristine ecological environment nurtures every grain of rice. The area is widely recognized as a natural home of premium rice.
Several years ago, however, farming there was dominated by scattered households and small cooperatives. Production standards varied, resulting in inconsistent rice quality. Meanwhile, the relatively high cost of green and organic testing and certification discouraged many producers from seeking certification. The difficulty of getting a good price for good rice became a major constraint on the local industry.
In response, Inner Mongolia coordinated industrial planning, strengthened policy support and addressed weaknesses on the production side to steadily expand green and standardized production capacity.
The region coordinated the development of standardized planting and breeding bases, encouraging scattered small-scale operations to move toward larger-scale production. As of January 2026, Inner Mongolia had established 55 green food supply bases covering 22.98 million mu (1.53 million hectares) across eight leagues and counties.
Different areas have developed distinctive industrial belts based on their resource advantages. For example, standardized rice cultivation is being promoted along the Xiliao River basin; large-scale green grain production is expanding in the Hetao Irrigation Area and ecological grassland-livestock systems are being developed in pastoral areas. Together, these efforts are creating a green industrial system that integrates crop and livestock production.
This differentiated approach helps avoid homogeneous competition and allows different leagues and cities to leverage their respective strengths while complementing one another.
In the past, many small farmers and micro and small enterprises could not afford testing and certification costs. Today, relevant expenses are partly covered by government funding. Inner Mongolia has introduced supporting subsidies to reduce the financial burden on producers and lower the threshold for green and organic certification.
From 2023 to 2026, the autonomous region allocated a total of 9.11 million yuan ($1.35 million), specifically for testing at production sites. The policy provides targeted support to market operators, easing their concerns about certification and encouraging the agricultural and livestock sector to move toward greener, higher-quality production.
As the benefits of these policies continue to emerge, they have also helped promote the development of product traceability systems, enabling high-quality agricultural and livestock products to command better market returns on the strength of credible quality standards.
For rice grower Chang Cunfeng, from a village in Jalaid Banner, the change is particularly tangible. In the past, his rice paddies were scattered and operated independently, with no unified production standards, while purchase prices fluctuated considerably.
After signing an order-based planting agreement with a rice company, he began following unified green rice production standards and receiving technical guidance throughout the production process. As a result, rice quality has become more consistent, while the contracted purchase price is higher than the market average.
Building a shared regional brand system
East Ujimqin Banner, located in the heart of the Xiliin Gol grassland, is a core production area for Ujimqin sheep. Its vast, pristine pastures and abundant, high-quality forage give its lambs a distinctive tenderness and flavor, providing an excellent natural foundation for premium livestock products.
Before regional public brands were integrated, Xiliin Gol's meat-processing industry was characterized as small-scale, fragmented, and disorderly. Numerous operators registered their own trademarks and developed markets independently. Homogeneous, low-price competition not only weakened the industry as a whole but also made it difficult to build market strength.
Consumers often identified lamb simply as being of "grassland origin", making no distinction of quality on the basis of organic production or standardized breeding. However, without strong coordination by a regional public brand, the value of the grassland's premium lamb cannot be fully realized.
Inner Mongolia has sought to reshape the industry around the "Meng" brand, a shared regional brand for premium products from the grasslands. It has introduced dedicated certification and management measures and established a uniform model covering brand, standards, identity, publicity and marketing.
This approach addresses the internal competition among regional brands. Through authoritative certification, it is also reshaping consumer perceptions, encouraging buyers to look beyond origin alone when judging quality and to place greater weight on standardized production and green certification when choosing agricultural and livestock products.
Herder Batu in East Ujimqin Banner is a direct beneficiary of the regional public brand. In the past, he mainly relied on middlemen who came to buy his sheep, leaving prices to market fluctuations, thus making household income difficult to predict.
After joining an order-based partnership with a company authorized to use the regional brand, his sheep are now raised according to standardized practices and are subject to full-process traceability. The company purchases the sheep at premium prices in line with the standards of the shared brand.
Without changing the traditional grazing conditions of the native grasslands, the standards and order mechanisms established under the regional brand have translated standardized breeding and guaranteed purchase prices into concrete benefits for herders.
The experience demonstrates that building the northern ecological security barrier does not require an either-or choice between environmental protection and higher income for herders. Instead, it is entirely possible to pursue a path of green modernization in which ecology, industry and people's livelihoods advance together.
Opening-up distribution channels
Rice from Hinggan League is grown in fertile cold-region soil and is known for its outstanding quality. In the early stages of industrial development, however, most of the rice was sold outside the region through individual farmers, without stable offline distribution outlets or well-developed online sales channels.
The product had a good reputation but struggled to make substantial sales. To address the challenges, Inner Mongolia has developed an integrated online-and-offline marketing system, accelerating the conversion of its green and ecological advantages into tangible market returns.
Offline, Inner Mongolia is building a multi-level network of physical marketing outlets. Field research found that since 2023, the region has established 23 marketing centers for premium agricultural and livestock products, showcasing more than 4,200 varieties of specialty products.
These centers are helping agricultural and livestock products enter government offices, universities and financial institutions, bringing local specialties into wider public view. At the same time, Inner Mongolia has introduced mobile exhibition halls in the form of agricultural and livestock product "caravans".
Since 2023, these mobile promotion platforms have traveled across all 12 leagues and cities of Inner Mongolia and visited 19 major cities across the country. More than 50 brand-promotion events have been held, reaching over 500,000 consumers.
To tap into the vast southern market, Inner Mongolia has also deepened cross-regional industrial cooperation. At a brand-launch event in Shenzhen promoting the shipment of fresh beef from northern China to South China's Guangdong province, 32 leading beef enterprises from Inner Mongolia met with 76 buyers from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The event led to the establishment of the Inner Mongolia-Guangdong beef industry alliance, creating a stable supply and distribution channel for direct shipments of premium beef to southern markets.
For online promotion and sales, Inner Mongolia has established a 5,300-square-meter comprehensive e-commerce livestreaming base equipped with 51 standardized studios.
By making innovative use of livestreaming platforms, the region has developed new approaches to promoting agricultural products and created immersive traceability experiences. A series of livestreams tells the story of the region's green agricultural and livestock products.
Livestream hosts enter grasslands, pastoral communities and farmland to broadcast production in real time, giving viewers a direct look at the entire process of green farming and animal husbandry. These livestreaming bases help address the lack of online marketing capabilities among farmers and herders.
Through immersive, on-site demonstrations of traceable production, they also ease consumers' concerns about product quality, turning online traffic into real increases in sales and, ultimately, higher incomes for farmers and herders.
Building a green quality-control system
Hulunbuir grassland lamb, renowned for its superior quality and backed by standardized controls throughout the entire production chain, was selected as an official food product for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, becoming a prominent calling card for Inner Mongolia's premium green agricultural and livestock products.
Behind this achievement is a comprehensive quality-control system covering breeding, processing and distribution, which has become a core source of competitiveness for the industry.
At the source, ecological quality is protected through differentiated farming and animal husbandry practices tailored to local conditions. Pastoral areas maintain a balance between grassland capacity and livestock numbers, implement seasonal grazing bans and rotational grazing, and use off-site housing systems to separate grazing from livestock housing according to seasonal needs.
Farming areas strictly follow green production practices and promote the return of crop residues to the soil, helping maintain soil fertility. Through this two-way interaction, protecting grasslands in pastoral areas and improving soil quality in farming areas, Inner Mongolia is building a virtuous cycle in which ecological protection and agricultural productivity reinforce each other, laying a solid green foundation for its agricultural and livestock products.
At the processing stage, the region is strengthening processing and preservation capacity while improving clean and low-carbon facilities. Inner Mongolia is promoting additive-free, low-temperature processing techniques and addressing weaknesses in primary processing at the production sites.
Leagues and cities are also accelerating the construction of cold-storage facilities and field-level preservation infrastructure, with Bayannuur showing particularly strong results.
By 2025, Bayannuur had built 300 small field-based cold-storage facilities with a combined capacity of more than 200,000 cubic meters. Fresh produce can now be moved directly into nearby storage facilities after harvesting and released to the market in a staggered manner.
The integrated development of processing and storage helps preserve freshness during the crucial "first mile" after harvest, eases price fluctuations caused by concentrated market arrivals and provides stronger infrastructure for specialty agricultural and livestock products to reach markets across the country.
At the distribution end, Inner Mongolia is also building a dense cold-chain logistics network. Given the region's vast east-west span, long transportation distances have driven up logistics costs and once represented a major bottleneck for agricultural and livestock products seeking access to outside markets.
Inner Mongolia has established a two-tier logistics system consisting of centralized distribution warehouses within the region and front warehouses at six major logistics hubs across the country. Five front warehouses, including those in Beijing, Tianjin and Zhengzhou in Henan province, are already operational.
After companies move into standardized warehouses, their overall logistics costs fall by 50 percent, while cross-provincial delivery times are shortened by 48 hours. This helps address the problems of spoilage and quality loss during long-distance transportation and the difficulty of obtaining better prices for premium products.
The warehousing and distribution network not only shortens transport distances and keeps products fresh along the way, but also reduces logistics costs through economies of scale, enabling Inner Mongolia's diverse specialty agricultural and livestock products to reach consumers across the country more quickly and efficiently.
From the ecological heritage shaped by millennia of life on the grasslands to the transformation of modern agriculture and animal husbandry, Inner Mongolia is turning its outstanding ecological resources into industrial advantages and tangible benefits for local people.
By continuing to build the "Meng" brand into a trusted name for green and organic agricultural and livestock products, Inner Mongolia is giving fresh impetus to green development across the vast northern frontier.
The author is an associate researcher of the Governance Academy of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
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