Upon entering the venue, Jiang Hai saw a massive oval table surrounded by many executive chairs. Behind each chair was another chair, and on the table in front of them lay a nameplate.
The meaning was clear: the invited guest would sit in the front, while the accompanying person could only sit in the back.
As soon as he walked in, Jiang Hai spotted Luuk Shaw and John Malone. Old Malone was seated in the first position on the left—being the largest landowner in America was no joke—while Luuk Shaw was in the fifth position on the right. Seeing Jiang Hai approach, they both nodded in greeting.
Jiang Hai smiled and nodded back, then started looking for his own seat. However, seeing where he was placed, Jiang Hai couldn't help but curl his lips. His position was quite far back—the second to last seat on the left. Considering there were only a little over twenty people attending the conference in total, Jiang Hai's seat was very distant from the head.
Although he didn't know much about these conventions, he understood that the further one sat from the head of the table at a meeting, the lower their status.
While Jiang Hai wasn't an official, this placement indicated his lower standing in the eyes of the officials present.
But his displeasure was momentary. Since he had originally intended to just slack off and coast through the meeting, he didn't really care.
Upon reaching his spot, Jiang Hai sat down immediately. Moses Adams took the chair behind him, pulling out a compact laptop to prepare for recording the day's meeting content, which was also what the other assistants were doing.
"Hello, Jiang Hai?" As Jiang Hai sat down, people continued to arrive. Soon, others were seated near him. To his left, in the third-to-last seat, sat a proud-looking bald man. He merely glanced at Jiang Hai and then said nothing more. Jiang Hai wasn't interested in this guy, who resembled Professor X. However, to his right, in the very last seat, was a white man about thirty years old. Reaching this position at thirty was no small feat; of course, Jiang Hai had his 'golden finger' (cheat ability) and didn't count.
After taking his seat, the man looked at Jiang Hai and asked him a question with a bright smile.
"Oh, hello, uh, Mr. Boggs." Hearing the question, Jiang Hai replied, though he didn't know who the man was. Only after glancing at the nameplate did Jiang Hai learn his name was Terry Boggs. What he did specifically, Jiang Hai had no idea.
"Haha, it's normal that you don't know me. Let me introduce myself: I'm Terry Boggs. I just fenced off a piece of land in Mexico State last July and started a livestock business." Hearing the hesitation in Jiang Hai's voice, Boggs laughed, then proactively extended his hand and introduced himself.
"Oh, Jiang Hai. I run a small ranch in Winthrop." Hearing his words, Jiang Hai shook his hand and introduced himself. In reality, almost no one here didn't know Jiang Hai; everyone knew him, but he knew few of them, especially since the forage grass incident last year had caused such a huge stir.
"I know you, man. Your forage grass, tsk tsk. To be honest, if my target wasn't strictly the mid-to-low-end market, I definitely would have attended your last grass sale." Terry Boggs said, chuckling after hearing Jiang Hai's introduction. Since Jiang Hai was bored and Boggs seemed eager to make friends, Jiang Hai started chatting with him.
However, as they talked, Jiang Hai realized that, based purely on tangible assets, he seemed to be the weakest among everyone present.
This wasn't about money. Attendees of this livestock summit were judged simply by how much land they owned and how many cattle they had.
Not counting the area of the sea, Jiang Hai's land totaled just under 27,000 acres, which is 160,000 mu, or 110 square kilometers. To Jiang Hai, this was already quite large; in fact, his property was already bigger than the town of Winthrop itself.
He had a total of 45,000 beef cattle: 30,000 Angus, 5,000 Limousin, 5,000 Charolais, and 5,000 Shorthorn.
But here, his numbers were... well, just "hehe." Terry Boggs, next to him, only had one ranch in Mexico State. Size? 72,000 acres, raising a total of 250,000 cattle. This level of strength meant sitting in the very back here. The big bald man next to Jiang Hai owned 120,000 acres across Montana and Wyoming, raising 800,000 cattle. Only people of this caliber were qualified to attend this kind of conference.
The United States is a major livestock nation; the value of livestock production accounts for 48% of all agricultural output—nearly 50%. This means that meat production is essentially equal to the combined production of grains, vegetables, and fruits. The US beef industry being the world's largest is a serious claim.
States across the US with a cattle inventory exceeding one million head account for 70% of the entire country.
Texas alone had an inventory of 14 million beef cattle in 2003, yet this only accounted for less than 15% of the national total that year. Kansas and Nebraska are also states with massive cattle inventories.
Other states included Oklahoma, California, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Colorado—these were the top ten states by inventory that year. However, everyone knows that Montana has been gaining significant momentum recently.
Now that the US has opened up the markets in China and Asia, the total beef cattle inventory across America is definitely no less than 200 million head.
As for China's inventory, it is less than 70 million head—it was only slightly over 68 million in 2013—and China has 1.3 billion people.
Furthermore, the slaughter rate and meat yield of Chinese cattle are lower than those in the US, and the population is four times larger... so it's no wonder that domestic beef is so expensive. Production determines everything, doesn't it?
The dairy cow inventory exceeds 20 million head, with an annual milk output of over 150 million tons. With a total US population of 300 million, that's nearly 500 kilograms of milk per person. Even if everyone drank one kilogram daily, they would still have over 100 kilograms leftover to discard.
Therefore, it's no surprise that prices are cheap in the US; the simple truth is that the country can't consume everything it produces.
Jiang Hai could only shrug at this realization. It truly seemed he was an absolute junior here.
Since that was the case, he decided to stick to his original plan: staying put and being honest was actually a good choice. After chatting with Terry Boggs for a while, an official staff member walked in.
Everyone quieted down, watching the official and waiting for the summit to begin.
"Ahem, hello everyone. My name is Baloa Kristen, and I am the current Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Livestock. You can call me Baloa. It is an honor to see all of you here today..." Seeing the crowd settle down, the serious-looking white man in his forties began to speak. Honestly, if this were China, a national-level Deputy Director of Livestock—my goodness—the most powerful livestock owner in the world would have to bow down and grovel, as this was the person in charge of regulating them.
But in the United States, especially in the eyes of these twenty-plus attendees, an official was just an official. In China, a single person shouldn't fight against powerful forces.
In the US, however, the government shouldn't fight against powerful forces. To wealthy Americans, these officials were simply minor figures!
They wouldn't dare cause trouble for people like them—that was the reality. The existence of so many political parties in the US was no joke.
Just the parties running in the election numbered four, although the fight was primarily between the Republicans and the Democrats.
But there were hundreds of people with votes in the Senate (Congress). These forces were deeply entrenched and intertwined, giving the situation a feel similar to the Ming Dynasty era. During the late Ming period in China, officials were basically cultivated by merchants from Jiangsu-Zhejiang and Guangdong-Guangxi.
After becoming officials, their main purpose was to secure benefits for their merchant class. The famous Donglin Faction was formed this way: if there was profit, they rushed to the front; if there wasn't, they disappeared. When the Qing army invaded, they simply changed emperors and didn't care. The current situation in the US is similar.
However, unlike the late Ming Dynasty, the merchants back then dealt primarily in goods like grain, salt, and cloth.
American merchants, on the other hand, were often involved in arms and weaponry to some degree, which is why they particularly favored war.
Bringing the topic back, the main point of discussing this was to show that a mere Deputy Director would not dare provoke people like Jiang Hai and the others.
Therefore, although the attendees were listening to him speak, their attitude was rather nonchalant. Some were even busy texting on their phones.
Only the accompanying person brought by each attendee was diligently recording his speech.
The main purpose of this conference was largely similar to meetings held in China: first, to review the current national inventory, the status of the US livestock industry—how the cattle, sheep, pigs, and other animals were faring.
Next, they would look toward the future, discussing things like maintaining the honor of being the world's strongest livestock nation.
Finally came the most crucial part: negotiating the price of meat.
Speaking of meat prices, the situation varies by state, meaning prices are different everywhere. Just like in China, if a place produces a certain commodity, that commodity is cheap; if it doesn't, the cost of transporting it from afar makes it expensive.
Take vegetables in Harbin, for example: they are fine in the summer but extremely expensive in the winter. Why? Because vegetables cannot be grown in the winter and must be shipped from the South. With the added freight costs, the price naturally rises. There's nothing more to be said about that. (To be continued.)