Mr. Chen

““Our families have raised cattle in the high mountains for generations.”

For many villagers, cattle raising is not simply a business decision but a livelihood practiced across generations. Mr. Chen’s household is one of the village’s larger cattle-owning families, with around sixty to seventy animals. “Our families have raised cattle in the high mountains for generations,” he says. In a good market, a mature animal may sell for more than 10,000 RMB; even in a weaker market, it may still be worth 6,000 to 7,000 RMB.

Local grazing also differs from modern intensive livestock production. Many cattle spend the entire year in the mountains rather than being kept in enclosures and fed daily. Allowing them to forage freely lowers the cost of raising them and follows a long-standing mountain practice.

As herd sizes increase, however, tensions between livelihood and ecology become more visible. Cattle entering forest areas over long periods eat bamboo shoots and trample newly emerging plants, making it harder for once-dense bamboo forests to regenerate. Forests that older residents remember as “green tunnels” have thinned enough that their edges can now be seen. The loss of bamboo also affects smaller plants that depend on forest conditions.

Local residents do not necessarily understand this as a simple story of “destruction.” For cattle-raising households, livestock represents income and security. Ending grazing can therefore mean losing a major economic foundation.

High-mountain grazing reveals a problem shared by many rural landscapes: when people depend on nature for survival, how can long-standing livelihoods and ecological protection be brought into a new balance?