Late autumn is the time for making lap yuk, a type of preserved pork that is a local speciality, and across town I would often spot slabs of meat hanging from high-rise apartment balconies, tied up with string and swaying next to shirts and sheets left out to dry. To make lap yuk, a piece of raw pork belly is soaked in a blend of rice wine, salt, soy sauce and spices, then hung out to cure in the damp, cold autumn air. The fat becomes translucent and imparts a savoury-sweet taste to any stir-fried vegetable dish. A relative of mine claims that only southern China can make preserved pork like this. The secret is the native spores and bacteria that are carried on the wind there. Guangzhou was the first stop on a journey I was taking in order to try to understand how artificial intelligence is transforming China's pork industry. The country is the world's largest producer of pork, and the story of how it has ramped up production in recent years to feed its growing middle class is sometimes described as "China's pork miracle".

The scene in your mind's eye is likely set in a rural area with farmhands doing back-breaking work. Hundreds of pigs are raised together, perhaps in a cramped space: they eat, they sleep, they play, they breed; and when the time comes, they are sent to the slaughterhouse by the truckload. But the nature of pig farms is changing in China. Some of the country's biggest names in the tech industry–Alibaba, JD–are lining up to become disruptors of this traditional business. In late 2017, Laozhang's family pig farm in a Beijing suburb received an unusual group of visitors--20 engineers from JD Finance's artificial intelligence (AI) department.

Most livestock and field crops rely heavily on the weather for their comfort, and providing water and energy. But China's more than 1.3 billion residents, a growing number of whom are becoming mid-income earners, are building up such an appetite that farmers are having to change the way they grow and sell food. In order to transform an ancient business that was largely run using intuition, the modern answer is technology. Artificial intelligence has come to the farmyard, helping to ensure the country's increasing numbers of pigs remain active and crop yields grow ever larger. This is the case for Wang Degen and his company Tequ Group, a major hog farm in Southwest China's Sichuan province.

At the Computing Conference 2018: Shanghai Summit on the same day, the company officially launched the ET Agricultural Brain, a program expected to achieve an in-depth fusion of artificial intelligence. So far the ET Agricultural Brain has already been applied to pig breeding, as well as apple and melon farming. "We hope that AI technology could help farmers and enterprises make safer, more nutritious and profitable products," Hu noted. According to Su Zhipeng, a senior researcher with Tequ Group, one of the major cooperators of Alibaba Cloud, a pig will make different sounds when eating and sleeping compared to when it's sick. The ET Agricultural Brain can judge whether a pig is sick by analyzing acoustic features and infrared thermometry.

At the Computing Conference 2018: Shanghai Summit on June 7, Alibaba Cloud introduced its ET Agricultural Brain that aims to lower pigs' death rate by 3% and allow each sow to raise three more piglets each year. According to its President, Simon Hu, ET Agricultural Brain can monitor each pig's daily activity, growth indicators and other health indexes using AI technologies such as visual recognition, voice recognition, and real-time environmental parameter monitoring. Hu said that active pigs will become favored over heavier ones: a pig that runs 200 km over the course of its life will be sold over a 100 kg one. Sharing his company's experiences using ET Agricultural Brain at the conference, Sichuan-based pig farming enterprise Tequ Group's Chairman Wang Degen said that Alibaba Cloud's technology and ecosystem integrates cutting edge interactive automation with hog farming. Other early adopters include the Shaanxi-based agricultural company Haisheng Group, which according to Alibaba Cloud's estimation, could save around USD 3.1M in annual operating costs by using the technology. ET Agricultural Brain has also been successfully used in the smart-city, transportation, industrial, and aviation sectors.