Siziwang Banner Entrepreneurs Take Grassland Products Beyond Local Markets

What changed

Young entrepreneurs returning to Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia are using livestreams, e-commerce and digital factories to move potatoes, dairy products and grassland meat beyond the locality.

• Ren Qiang and Chang Caihong’s potato business rose from 2,000 orders in 2019 to 300,000 in 2025, with a target of 500,000 this year.
• Yu Yang’s digital dairy factory reports 260 tonnes of annual output, 36 supplying herder households, 24 local jobs and more than 560 distributors and shops.
• Li Hongliang says his online meat business has completed more than 6,000 orders and exceeded 1 million yuan in sales since April 2025.

Why it matters

The change is not simply that local products are appearing online. The bigger shift is that selling, processing and distribution are beginning to sit in the same local system.

Ren’s operation has collected about 300 tonnes of potatoes, 80 tonnes of sunflower and 200 tonnes of pumpkins from farmers. That gives producers a route beyond the old problem of growing good food without a reliable buyer. The livestream is functioning as a sales counter, collection point and connection to customers far beyond the banner.

Yu’s factory shows the same idea in a different form. Traditional milk foods, including milk curd and milk skin, remain part of the product base, while automated equipment, intelligent management and new flavours such as freeze-dried cheese help turn inherited craft into goods that can travel. The factory can process up to 1.5 tonnes of fresh milk a day, linking pastoral households to a more regular industrial customer.

Meat is taking the direct-to-consumer route. Li’s buyers are concentrated in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Shanghai, bringing Siziwang Banner’s free-range beef and lamb to markets far south of the grassland. His approach is deliberately plain: let the product carry the sale.

The local industry bureau says it is supporting network infrastructure, e-commerce services, branding and links between producers and buyers. That matters because a livestream or online shop can open the door, but stable growth depends on what happens behind it: collection, processing, packaging and repeat delivery.

The reported figures are encouraging, but they do not yet show profitability, repeat purchases or how much farmers’ incomes have risen. The clearest test will be whether these businesses can keep turning online attention into dependable orders and dependable orders into steadier returns for the households supplying them.