Day 2

The day began with breakfast at the hotel restaurant Cheena, which had a variety of foods including eggs, toast, vegetables, fruit, noodles, and rice.  We then boarded the coach bus and headed to the Pioneer Headquarters.  Will Marsh and Mark Cool provided us with a background of Pioneer's work in China.  China Pioneer uses some hybrid corn seeds that are blue in color and come in a bag that is about the size of a bag of chips. Each bag contains about 8,500 seeds, enough to plant 2 mu (1/3 acre).  Average farm size is 1-2 acres per family. They use a blue color on the seeds that is difficult to replicate because of the polymer used.  Counterfeit bags which look like they contain Pioneer seed but actually do not are a common problem in China.  Piracy is another common problem in which people will use the parent plant to grow their own hybrid seed to sell.  Unlike the United States, China does not do soil testing, but they do spread urea on the fields, often at rates 4x more than the corn needs. Pioneer in China works only with corn.  While China's population is not booming, China's middle class is.  Because of this increase of the middle class population, demand for animal protein is greatly increasing, which in turn increases the demand for corn to use as animal feed.

To go along the same lines as Pioneer, Dr. Richard Han from the US Soybean Export Council talked to us about the soybean industry. China imports about 80% of their soybeans. This means that about 1 in 4 rows of US soybeans are exported to China.

We ate lunch at a local restaurant, No. 6 Restaurant, where we celebrated Jacob's 21st birthday with birthday cake.

From there, we went to the Beijing Equestrian Show Facility and met Shirley. The facility housed about 130 horses used for dressage and jumping. The horses were mostly warmbloods and of high value. The ground in the practice arenas was unlike what is used in the US, and contained sand and pieces of fabric which felt like fleece.

We then traveled to the Silk Market, which is essentially a big mall where you can bargain with the seller to get the right price that fits for you.  We had to bargain using a calculator and type in what we wanted to buy it for and the seller either did not like it or you compromised until you got the right price.  Most of us ended up buying things like North Face jackets, Coach purses, and tailored suits.

We finished the day at a buffet featuring both Chinese food and pizza!  We need to load up on pizza because tomorrow we climb the Great Wall.