China is planning to produce an additional one million cows per year, which wouldn’t be particularly exceptional news except the fact that all the cows will be clones, according to a report by Global Meat News. China is currently constructing the world’s first, and largest, cloning factory in Tianjin with the goal of disrupting the beef industry. The huge US$30 million, government-backed facility will also produce racehorses, sniffer dogs, and even family pets.

 

Global demand for beef has tripled over the past two decades, and despite the number of cattle in China going to slaughter increasing from 13 million in 1991 to 47 million in 2011, the country’s producers have been under pressure to scale up, modernize, commercialize, and increase output. This increase in demand has resulted in the price of beef in China increasing three-fold between 2000 and 2013, but commercial cloning could reverse this trend.

 

The facility is being built in partnership between the research institute, Sinica, a subsidiary of Boyalife Group, which is pursuing developments in regenerative medicine and stem cell technologies, Peking University, the Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine, and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which has been working to resurrect the woolly mammoth using cloning, according to International Business Times.

 

The factory is scheduled to begin operations in the first half of 2016 with initial production of 100,000 high quality cow embryos per year, eventually increasing production to account for 5% of China’s slaughtered cattle, according to Xu Xiaochun, chief executive of BoyaLife, reports The Guardian.

 

Chinese scientists have cloned animals for scientific purposes including sheep, pigs, and cattle since 2000, but the commercial cloning of animals is entirely new. Mr. Xiaochun states that he has hopes that this facility will support the “mainstream acceptance” of cloning technologies.