A brand table for livestock and poultry cannot rank farming as such, because the farm is not where a brand gets bought, and the two companies at the top of this one make that plain. JBS and Tyson Foods lead on US$86.2 billion and US$54.44 billion, and both turn the bulk of that money over converting animals into meat. JBS runs more than 500 processing plants in over 190 countries with daily capacity for 100,000 cattle, 140,000 pigs and 14 million birds; Tyson holds more than 100 primary production sites and sells into over 130 countries, and its beef division spent 2025 closing plants in Kansas and Illinois because live cattle grew too expensive to feed through them. Neither is a livestock business in the sense a farmer would use the word. One slaughters and trades; the other slaughters and brands.
What the 35% brand weight is actually rewarding. A brand lives where a buying decision is made, and in this industry those decisions cluster at retail and in food service. Seara recorded its highest export volume inside JBS in 2025; Tyson pushed portable high-protein products into American grocery; both names sit on packaging a shopper or a chef recognises. Muyuan's name sits on feed bags, breeding stock and wholesale pork, and in a market where most Chinese pork still moves through wet markets and processors rather than a branded pack, the same industrial scale produces far less consumer recognition. The index measures that difference, and the difference is real rather than a defect in the method.
Where the ranking stops being useful. Read as a measure of who controls the stretch in which an animal becomes meat, the order is accurate: JBS, Tyson, WH Group and CPF earn there. Read as a measure of who can raise animals, it inverts the industry. Muyuan put 77.981 million hogs through its barns in 2025 at a full cost of RMB 12 per kilogram, the lowest in the industry, and grew its slaughtering arm 128.9% to 28.663 million head. On 89 points it ranks fifth, behind companies whose names reach the buyer as branded meat rather than as animals. Nothing there is wrong on the weighted tests, which means the reader has to supply the question the page answers.
What would change the order. VerityRank runs a second table in this series, scored on owned production capacity rather than brand reach, and the same companies land in a different sequence there. That is the honest way to handle the tension: a brand index should not pretend to measure husbandry, and a capacity index should not pretend to measure fame. Forcing one number to answer both questions would produce a score that answers neither, which is why eight of these ten companies are scored twice and why the reader is expected to look at the question behind the table before the table itself.
The call this page makes. A ranking that put Muyuan first would be a production ranking wearing a brand's title. VerityRank scores brands, so the brand layer wins, and two companies whose income statements are dominated by the abattoir, the cold chain and the trading desk take the top two places while the most productive livestock company in the world lands fifth on the strength of its name and its physical base alone. Read the score column rather than the position for the farming story, and treat 92 as a statement about recognition and revenue, not about livestock.
New Hope Liuhe scores 85 because the Fortune place belongs to its parent, and the index scores entities rather than groups. New Hope Holding Group is 426th on the 2025 Fortune Global 500. The company on this page, New Hope Liuhe (SZSE: 000876), is that group's listed subsidiary and holds no position of its own. Its turnover of roughly US$15.0 billion comes to less than half the US$32.2 billion line the 2025 list drew, and the 90-to-100 band on the Livestock & Poultry Brand Authority Index is reserved for companies that clear that line on their own accounts. A subsidiary does not inherit the qualification, and a group's place does not travel down to the operating company that sells under the brand.
What the boundary costs, and what it does not touch. On industrial measures New Hope Liuhe belongs in the top ten. It runs more than 300 production workshops across more than 10 countries, carries feed capacity above 28 million tonnes a year, slaughters more than 500 million birds and raises over 16 million hogs annually with roughly 70,000 staff. Those are the numbers that hold it at seventh rather than lower. What the boundary removes is one thing only: the revenue band. A parent's consolidated turnover includes businesses the subsidiary does not own, so scoring the subsidiary on it would credit a company with money it never books, which is the same error that would rank a brand licensor above the plant that actually makes the product.
The rule cuts both ways on this page. WH Group at US$28.03 billion is the closest miss and owes nothing to a parent: it files its own consolidated accounts and those accounts sit below the line, which is why a group with capacity for more than 50 million hogs a year scores 88 rather than 92. JBS shows the opposite edge. It stands at 167th on the published 2025 list on US$77,182.6 million while reporting US$86.2 billion for FY2025, because the list takes the accounts of the filing entity for the year it covers rather than the latest fiscal year. Every test on this page is applied to one legal entity and its own filings, never to a family of companies.
How to read 85 against the companies above it. WH Group on 88 files its own accounts, misses the line at US$28.03 billion and still scores three points higher than New Hope Liuhe, while Muyuan on 89 earns its turnover in one market and one category. The four-point gap between 85 and 89 is not a gap in industrial competence, which all three share, but in how much of the brand a buyer would recognise in the street and how much of the revenue the scored entity can call its own. Readers comparing Chinese feed and farming groups should compare operating footprints first and scores second, because the scores were built to separate brands rather than farms, and New Hope Liuhe is a feed name that also happens to farm.
What the 85 therefore says. It describes a company with a first-tier industrial footprint and second-tier turnover, and it puts a price on the recognition behind the name: New Hope is a feed brand first and a meat brand second, and its 2025 work – asset disposals, a lighter balance sheet, a fourth quarter dragged down by falling hog prices and biological-asset impairments – reads as a business managing a cycle rather than buying brand presence. The score is not a penalty aimed at the parent's structure. It is the score of the company that exists, and any reader who wants the group should be reading the group's own filings.
Ownership decides what a brand is for, and the two farmer-owned businesses in this series keep brands for a different reason than the listed companies that surround them. Fonterra sits sixth on this page with 87 points on NZ$26.0 billion, about US$16.0 billion, collected as more than 16 billion litres of milk and processed through 28 large automated plants in New Zealand, with exports to over 130 countries, roughly 19,000 staff and about US$4.2 billion of that turnover booked in China. Its units trade on the NZX and the ASX, but the farms that fill those plants hold the votes. Danish Crown is the series' other cooperative and appears on the manufacturer table: founded in 1887, unlisted, DKK 65.0 billion, about US$9.55 billion, owned by the farmers who deliver pigs to its abattoirs.
Listed companies brand the product, cooperatives brand the origin. A listed processor spends on brand to raise the price a shopper pays for the pack, and whatever margin that creates belongs to shareholders. A cooperative spends on brand to defend what the member is paid for milk or pigs, and the surplus returns as a payout, which makes every marketing dollar a dollar that is not in this season's milk cheque. That is why the two answer differently to the same question. Fonterra separating its consumer brands, Anchor among them, to concentrate capital on B2B dairy ingredients and food-service solutions follows from it: with 16 billion litres behind it, the cooperative earns more as the certified origin and specification behind someone else's label than as a tenant of retail shelf space. Danish Crown moves the other way, because its members deliver fresh meat into European retail where the pack itself is the product.
Capital is the sharper division. A listed company can raise equity against a brand story and a growth plan. A cooperative can only retain from the flow of milk or pigs, which sets a ceiling on how fast it builds and how long it can carry a name that pays back slowly. Fonterra's 87 sits below CPF on 89 and Muyuan on 89, companies with larger turnover, and also below New Hope Liuhe on 85 points with roughly US$15.0 billion, a smaller business that spends its marketing money on a listed company's terms. Danish Crown on 82 sits level with BRF and Wens on the same mark. Cooperative ownership is not a weaker brand model. It is a different asset, carrying a payout obligation that listed peers do not.
The judgment. Cooperatives build names that are auditable and specification-grade rather than emotional, which is a strength with industrial buyers and a handicap in an index that gives 35% of the weight to brand influence. Any future dairy or pork cooperative wanting a higher place on a page like this one will have to buy consumer recognition with capital its members would rather see in the payout, and the honest question is whether that trade is worth making at all. Fonterra's answer is on the record: it is not.
Cal-Maine Foods turns over US$4.262 billion and earns US$1.220 billion of net income, a margin near 28.6% in a commodity business where single digits are normal, and that pairing is the most instructive fact on this page. For scale: JBS earned US$2.02 billion on US$86.2 billion, so Cal-Maine's profit comes to about 60% of JBS's on under 5% of the revenue; Tyson earned US$474 million, less than half of it, on nearly thirteen times the turnover. WH Group's net income of US$1.591 billion on US$28.03 billion is a 5.7% margin. The smallest company here outperforms the largest by an order of magnitude on profitability, and the reason is structural rather than lucky management.
Where the margin comes from. Two facts sit behind it. The first is mix: 36.7% of volume is specialty eggs – cage-free, organic, selenium-enriched – which carry prices well above commodity shell eggs, against 63.3% conventional. That mix is a business decision, made over years, and it earns more per dozen with each turn of the cycle. The second is disease: highly pathogenic avian influenza removed laying flocks across the United States in 2025, supply tightened, egg prices rose, and a company holding 51.8 million laying hens across 49 layer farms, 50 packing plants, 30 feed mills and 2 hatcheries captured the difference on more than 1.1 billion dozen eggs. The first repeats. The second does not, and separating the two is the whole analytical task.
Why the flock held. The premium only reaches a producer that still has hens to sell into it. Cal-Maine's cage-free housing and biosecurity regime kept its flock at 51.8 million laying hens through an outbreak that thinned the national flock nationwide, so the company collected the price rather than paying for it in culled birds and replacement pullets. A competitor that lost a house lost the margin and the capital to rebuild at the same time, and the two losses arrive together, which is exactly why housing and isolation spending is the only insurance this industry has.
Scale without diversification. Roughly 4,000 people run that network, which makes Cal-Maine the most thinly staffed business in the top ten by a wide margin: US$4.262 billion of turnover across those staff is about US$1.07 million of revenue per employee, against US$0.41 million at Tyson and US$0.31 million at JBS. It is also the only entrant with no Chinese revenue at all. It is also the only single-category company here: one animal, one product, one country. A single-category producer has no internal transfer of margin, so a bad egg year has nothing to offset it, and no other segment can subsidise a rebuild after a cull. The 2025 result is what that structure looks like in a good year, and the same structure is why the good years arrive with the disease.
The judgment. A 28.6% net margin is a price event rather than a franchise, and Cal-Maine's own capital allocation concedes the point: Echo Lake and Van's Foods were bought to move volume into liquid egg and ready-to-eat egg products, where the earnings are contractual instead of cyclical. The index scores durability, not the peak year, which is why the highest net income on the page belongs to the lowest score, 81. Anyone reading that 81 as a verdict on the business has misread the column: it is a verdict on repetition, and the windfall of 2025 is precisely what the score refuses to capitalise.
Four Chinese companies sit on this table and no two of them occupy the same position, because they have made four different bets about where value sits in China's protein chain. WH Group takes third place on 88 points as a branded processor: more than half its turnover and over 90% of its operating profit come from packaged meat rather than fresh pork, it runs plants in China, the United States, Poland, Romania and Mexico, holds capacity for more than 50 million hogs a year and sells more than 3 million tonnes of processed meat, with roughly US$13.5 billion of revenue booked in China and 106,000 employees. Its bet is the label on the pack, and Shuanghui and Smithfield give it two of them.
Muyuan takes the production bet. Fifth on 89 points, it raised 77.981 million hogs in 2025 and booked RMB 144.145 billion, about US$20.2 billion, drawn entirely from China – the largest single-market revenue base among these four. Its wager is cost and control: RMB 12 per kilogram of full production cost, 98.8% capacity utilisation in a slaughtering arm that grew 128.9% to 28.663 million head, and barns and plants it owns outright rather than contracts for. Where WH Group earns from what is done to the animal, Muyuan earns from making the animal cheaply in the first place.
New Hope Liuhe and Wens take the other two positions. New Hope Liuhe is a feed company that farms: more than 28 million tonnes of annual feed capacity and over 300 production workshops in more than 10 countries, with more than 500 million birds slaughtered and over 16 million hogs raised a year on roughly 70,000 staff, seventh on 85 points and held out of the 90s by a parent's Fortune place that does not transfer. Wens runs a network rather than a herd: 45,000 cooperating farm households producing more than 30 million hogs and over 1.1 billion birds, RMB 13.2 billion returned to those households in 2025, RMB 103.862 billion of turnover, about US$14.6 billion, eighth on 82 points.
All four are walking the same direction from different starting places. Muyuan lifted slaughtering 128.9% to 28.663 million head and now sells pork as well as pigs. Wens is pushing prepared dishes and slaughter capacity under its Jiawei line to move away from selling live animals. New Hope Liuhe wants to distribute chilled meat on top of a feed business that dwarfs its farming. WH Group finished the trip years ago, with processed meat above half of turnover and over 90% of operating profit. Each of the four is trying to own more of the chain, and the starting position decides what the next dollar of capital buys: cheaper pigs at Muyuan, faster brand reach at WH Group, more households at Wens, more feed volume at New Hope Liuhe.
What the order says. Within these four the position column tracks turnover exactly – US$28.03 billion, US$20.2 billion, US$15.0 billion, US$14.6 billion – while the score column does not, since Muyuan's 89 sits above WH Group's 88 at a much smaller revenue. That gap is where the two companies differ in kind rather than size: one owns the brand, the other owns the barn, and the index gives 35% of its weight to the first. Four Chinese entrants, four bets, one conclusion a reader can carry away. This page rewards the company that owns the name on the pack over the company that owns the animals, and it does so consistently, from first place to eighth.
