I write this while flying from Urumqi to Qingdao in China, after having taken part in a sheep and beef roadshow organised by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. The road show has been arranged to explore agri-tech opportunities for companies in China.
I can almost hear you ask: why would we want to help China grow their sheep and beef industry when they could potentially threaten ours?
My blunt answer is: they will do this with or without us. China's hunger for knowledge, their ability to industrialise farming and innovate will ensure that they will significantly increase quantities of their own sheep meat and beef in the future.
The China sheep industry is where their dairy industry was five to 10 years ago - primed to go, with significant investment starting.
One company I visited has farms and plants throughout Inner Mongolia and is investing heavily in developing a fully integrated supply chain. This means the company owns all parts of the supply chain, from farm to chopstick, including their own cold chain facilities and retail and online assets.
This is not new in China and is a trend which has developed from the need to manage food safety. Confidence from knowing that the forage prepared for the livestock is unadulterated through to controlling how the meat is presented in the marketplace is critical for long-term success.
The company is only three years old and has a well-educated, highly capable management team, led by business people who have already built a considerable-sized publicly listed company in the forestry sector.
They own farms which are feedlots and cut and carry forage and silage systems. They assist with development and management of local farmer co-operative feedlots where increasingly they provide rams, from their own breeding programmes, and feed in exchange for lambs. This is all supported by government at local and national levels.
This company has plans of eye-watering scale, intending to list on the China stock exchange in the next two years.
Another company is similarly savvy, with even greater past business success. They belong to a group of companies whose stable includes a company which produces a car-wheel part with which they have captured 13% of the global market!
This company is situated in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China, where there are many ethnic minorities. The region is bordered by the ''Stans'', India and Russia. Eating lamb is a massive part of their culture and is considered vital for the political stability of the region, especially given their Islamic population.
The lamb company is also only three years old and already has 40,000 ewes. The ewes - local Hu and Han breeds - lamb three times in two years and are highly fertile; producing two to three lambs per ewe for each lambing.
The company's genetic challenge is to maintain fertility while improving meat yield and lamb growth rates.
They, too, plan to develop a fully integrated supply chain, but not before they have expanded their sheep numbers to 200,000 in two years!
There is nothing like getting out of your own country to open your mind and contemplate the position of your home patch.
What might this mean for New Zealand's sheep industry?
What we are really good at in New Zealand is animal husbandry, forage management, quality processing and capitalising on increasing land prices.
What we are not so good at is industrial-style thinking, co-operating as unified businesses and creating value for our products in the market.
Volatility of commodities will continue and at times will be drastic, as we are experiencing with dairying. To compete with the increasing production from China, we need to develop high-end routes for our products in China and other markets and, very importantly, we need to work on China business partnerships to ensure security of supply.
As always, it is important to work on our own businesses, making them better and more efficient, but we mustn't forget to scan the horizon and be positioned for change.
Should the New Zealand sheep industry be concerned? Yes, probably, but let's use that as the impetus for strategic action.
- Anna Campbell is managing director of AbacusBio Ltd, a Dunedin-based agribusiness consulting and new ventures company.
