With the world's largest high-speed rail network, a payments system that's largely conducted via phone apps, and half the world's solar power plants, China often looks like a country at the technological frontier. When you consider how it feeds itself, though, it's still just catching up.

About 44 per cent of the country's livestock in 2010 were still raised in backyards and traditional mixed farms, where they mingle with crops and other animals. While that's a dramatic fall from a generation ago, when about 97 per cent of livestock were raised in traditional conditions, it trails countries like the US and Europe, where 95 per cent or more of pigs and poultry are raised in so-called "intensive systems" - in common parlance, factory farms.

Washington Post