History
AgFeed
was founded in 1995 by five young Chinese agri-businessmen. Each of our founders remains active in
the business today. Originally,
the company’s focus was on the sale of pre-mix, the carbohydrates and protein
that when mixed with corn and soybean meal form the basic animal ration.
Based on their expertise and through the use of industry
experts formulations were developed for the various stages of an animal’s life.
Our formulations aided farmers in achieving efficiencies in the use of
feedstuffs and resulted in AgFeed becoming a leader in providing safe products and
led to the "Green Certification" of our “Best” product line by the Chinese Government.
In late 2006 AgFeed became a public company in the United States in order to access the capital needed to execute its strategy of consolidation and growth.
The first step in our strategy was to establish a base of hog production through the purchase of larger commercial hog farms. The initial objective was to establish AgFeed as a significant market participant and bring the efficiencies of consolidation to these farms through centralized management and buying power. These acquisitions were completed in 2008.
While significant efficiencies
have been realized within our initial group of farms, we recognized that these
farms would not reach the production efficiencies typical of western hog
production facilities that integrate state of the art facility design,
management techniques and genetics.To this end during late 2008 and into 2009 we established strategic
partnerships with a leading western genetics company,
Hypor (a division of Hendricks)
and a leading hog production company,
M2P2, LLC. These relationships have been established as linchpins in our plan to
import the best and most efficient western techniques and methods to China as
we develop “greenfield” western style farms.In 2010 we
augmented these strategic
relationships with an agreement with
PIC (a division of Genus PLC).
We acquired M2P2, LLC in September 2010 establishing a platform from which we could pursue growth opportunities in the United States and also bringing "in-house" the techniques, technologies and expertise necessary to fully realize the potential of the western style farms that are under development in China.
In March of 2011 we stocked the first of our western-style farms in Dahua. Initial production will reach market in the spring of 2012. Our current plans for the development of these western-style farms call for farms housing 50,000 breeding sows with annual production capacity of 1,200,000 market hogs by 2016.
In 2010 we took the initial steps to move forward with the final stage of
deploying a fully integrated hog production system. Establishing a fully integrated production system from the
feed that the animals eat, to their breeding and growth and finally to
slaughter and processing – the harvest.
We are in the process of surveying sites and planning the construction
of two slaughter houses in Dahua and Xinyu that will process the hogs bread and
grown through our western style farm system.