Wang Chuduan, a professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing who specializes in pig breeding, estimates there are about 2,000 of these purebred pigs in China, up from just 100 in the 1990s.
“The People’s Pig of the Northeast is one of the most important and most representative among all the native pig breeds,” Mr. Wang said. “If they are not conserved, they will disappear.”
Little Black, Little White, Little Gray and Old White lived among 200 other pigs, chickens and cows at the Green Cow Farm on the outskirts of Beijing. Lejen Chen, the farm’s American co-owner, started the organic farm 14 years ago to supply her two restaurants with chicken, pork and milk because she could not find a safe source of food in Beijing.
Just before a weeklong national holiday in October, local officials told the farm’s owners that they needed to get rid of all of their animals within five days, Ms. Chen said. If they failed to do so, the officials warned, bulldozers would cover them up.
“They wanted all animals off, you could not leave one chicken,” Ms. Chen said. “They said when the higher-ups come for the tour, if there was one chicken here, they would lose their jobs.”
China is on a campaign to shut down small farms in favor of building large-scale commercial operations like the kind in the United States. Officials say the move will improve food safety and the environment. Last year, the Beijing government said it had shut down 370 farms in its suburbs, reducing major pollutants.
An official from the Lixian Town Agricultural Service Center, which governs the village where Green Cow Farm is situated, said that in April the local authorities started making farms comply with a policy that farms with greenhouses can only be used for growing vegetables and cannot contain livestock. The official, who declined to give his name, denied that the authorities gave the farm only a few days to get rid of all of its animals.
