Owned capacity in this industry is a production-control test before it is a property test, and the two largest Chinese Manufacturers on this page pass it with opposite asset structures: Muyuan owns the barns, Wens owns the protocol, and under a 40 percent weight on owned production both are counted because neither of them buys a finished animal from an open market. The dimension asks who decides what the animal eats, where it lives, which vaccine it receives, how it is moved and which plant it dies in. On both models the answer is the Manufacturer, and in neither case is a third party paid a margin for owning the animal in between.
Where Muyuan Puts The Asset. Muyuan is the only entry on this page that runs 100 percent self-built multi-storey complexes and its own slaughterhouses, and the volume that leaves them is the largest single-species flow here: 77.981 million hogs marketed in 2025, 28.663 million head slaughtered, a rise of 128.9 percent, and 3.23 million tonnes of pork sold. Revenue of RMB 144.145 billion, about US$20.2 billion, is earned entirely inside China by 127,600 employees. Every pig house, feed mill and abattoir sits on the balance sheet, so the company carries the depreciation, the construction risk and the biosecurity capital that goes with filtered air. It also carries the reward: a reported complete cost of production below RMB 13 per kilogram puts it at the low end of the global cost curve.
Where Wens Puts It. Wens built the mirror image of that structure. Some 45,000 farm households raise its pigs and chickens on their own land and their own books, under a contract that hands them piglets or chicks, feed, veterinary protocol and biosecurity standards and then takes the finished animals back for company slaughter. The company sold more than 30 million hogs and more than 1.1 billion birds in a year on RMB 103.862 billion, about US$14.6 billion, of revenue with roughly 52,000 employees. The housing belongs to the household, while the genetics, the feed formula, the drug protocol and the abattoir belong to Wens.
What The Weight Should Not Be Read To Measure. Taken as a property count, this dimension would exclude Wens and most contract-based poultry production in the United States, which would leave a livestock index that cannot see the second-largest pig producer in China or the birds behind a Tyson plant. Taken as a control test, it excludes the models that genuinely own nothing: a meat trader buying carcasses at auction, a brand licensing its name onto another company's line, and a toll processor operating equipment it does not hold. Scale in the trading book cannot substitute for a claim on the animal, and a finished hog that is bought and resold earns nothing.
The Judgement. Both structures are correctly counted as owned capacity, and the index does not prefer one of them on principle. It does show the difference in the score gap, though. Muyuan takes 89 and Wens 82, and part of that seven-point spread is structural rather than qualitative: an index built around owned physical scale counts the square metres a company put up and the animals it killed itself, and Wens's 45,000 farm households are real capacity held on somebody else's asset register. That is the honest cost of the model that made Wens the cheaper of the two to expand in the first place, and it is the reason the two companies read as opposites even though both pass the same 40 percent gate.
The 90-point band is a revenue test drawn at the 2025 Fortune Global 500 entry line of US$32.2 billion, and it is cleared by exactly two companies on this page, both of them processors: JBS on US$86.2 billion of fiscal 2025 revenue and Tyson Foods on US$54.44 billion. They are also the page's two Fortune members, at No. 167 on US$77,182.6 million and No. 278 on US$53,309 million, and their 92s sit at the top of a table whose lowest score is 81. Every other company here is held below 90 by arithmetic: Muyuan about US$20.2 billion, Charoen Pokphand Foods about US$18.2 billion, Fonterra about US$16.0 billion, Yili about US$15.8 billion, Wens about US$14.6 billion, BRF about US$11.8 billion, Danish Crown about US$9.55 billion and Cal-Maine Foods US$4.262 billion.
Why The Line Sits Where It Does. The rule reserves 90 and above for companies whose own revenue clears the threshold, whether they appear on the register or publish a figure above it. Membership follows the filer of the consolidated accounts and does not pass down to a subsidiary or a division, so a parent's place cannot be borrowed and a child's revenue cannot be inflated by it. That makes the top band a statement about the size of the entity being scored rather than a medal for the quality of its farms, and it means a livestock producer outside the register stays in the 80s however many animals it owns.
Why Farming Revenue Cannot Reach The Band. The reason no pure producer gets there is the shape of the value chain. A pig farmer's revenue is hogs sold multiplied by the price of a hog, and neither term belongs to him: the volume is capped by how fast a sow can be bred and how many barns are standing, and the price is set by a market that none of the ten companies on this page controls. A processor books that same animal plus the labour, packaging, freight and branded margin of everything done to it, and JBS books it across three proteins at once. Both leaders also hold the biggest physical base in the category, since JBS kills 100,000 cattle, 140,000 hogs and 14 million birds a day across more than 500 plants and Tyson works from more than 100 primary production sites, so their 92s reward capacity and revenue standing inside the same company rather than trading in animals somebody else raised.
What Would Move A Producer Up. The movement has to come from the processing end rather than the breeding end. Muyuan lifted slaughter volume 128.9 percent to 28.663 million head in 2025 and put 3.23 million tonnes of pork on the market, which is the start of that shift on the largest pig herd in the world, and its revenue is still only about 63 percent of the entry line. Cal-Maine Foods sits at the opposite extreme: 51.8 million laying hens and more than 1.1 billion dozen eggs a year produce US$4.262 billion, roughly a twentieth of what JBS earns, and no gain in the layer sheds closes that gap.
The Judgement. The two 92s go to companies that are at once the largest asset owners and the largest revenue earners in the category, and they are processors because processing is where an animal's value is multiplied rather than merely produced. A reader should treat the 90 band on this page as a statement about scale, and read the other eight positions as statements about capacity. The two tests are not the same test, and the index keeps them apart on purpose.
Two cooperatives sit on this page and they are moving at different speeds for a reason that has nothing to do with ambition: Fonterra sells a commodity that travels, and Danish Crown sells fresh meat that has to be eaten near the place where the animal was killed. Both are owned by the farms that fill their plants rather than by public shareholders, and both count as owned capacity for exactly that reason, but the capacity each of them is adding answers to a different demand signal.
The Exporter. Fonterra collected and processed more than 16 billion litres of milk in the latest year, ran 28 large automated dairy plants in New Zealand, exported to more than 130 countries and reported NZ$26.0 billion, about US$16.0 billion, of revenue for a score of 87. Its 2025 restructuring is the clearest statement of the difference: the cooperative moved to sell its consumer business and concentrate capital on business-to-business ingredients and foodservice, added specialty protein and UHT cream lines at two of its sites, and treats China as its largest single market at roughly US$4.2 billion of sales. A marginal litre of milk can become a powder, a protein isolate or a cream and leave the country, so new dryer capacity is underwritten by an export order book instead of by domestic demand.
The Fresh Meat Producer. Danish Crown has been a cooperative since 1887 and remains unlisted, with plants in Denmark, Britain, Germany, Poland and China that take more than 15 million pigs and 500,000 cattle a year, DKK 65.0 billion, about US$9.55 billion, of revenue and a score of 82. Its core product is chilled pork sold into European retail, a short-shelf-life business in which the animal has to be killed, cut and sold within days, and a long sea voyage is not an option for most of the carcass. Growth therefore comes from taking share in a market that is barely growing, from premium export cuts, or from the plant it built at Jiaxing in China, its first processing site outside Europe and the source of more than US$1 billion of sales. Its Horizon programme cut DKK 94 million of administrative cost, and it targets halving the carbon footprint of a kilogram of pork by 2030; both are margin and compliance projects rather than capacity projects.
Why Cooperative Capital Is The Binding Constraint. A cooperative cannot issue equity to the public, so a new plant is funded from retained earnings and debt and priced against the amount it pays its own member farms for milk or pigs. That gives both companies the same discipline and the same political limit: a project has to be defensible to thousands of farmer-owners whose income depends on the price the processing arm pays for the raw material. Fonterra's answer is a portfolio that earns a global ingredient margin from a commodity that ships well. Danish Crown's answer is cost reduction inside capacity it already owns.
The Judgement. The gap between 87 and 82 is not a verdict on either ownership model; it measures how much room each company has to add another plant. An export-ingredient cooperative can size a new dryer against customers in 130 countries, while a fresh-meat cooperative has to sell the pig first and can only sell it within the shelf life of a chilled cut. Until Danish Crown's Asian plants account for a much larger share of its volume, its expansion will keep being measured in cost per kilogram rather than in new capacity, and that is a limit set by the product rather than by the management.
Yili and Youran Dairy appear in the same research note and are scored as two separate legal entities, so the dairy group is read on the revenue it reports for itself while the farming platform is named as the upstream asset that holds the pasture and herd side of the business, and the two revenue figures are never added together. Yili is the Shanghai-listed dairy group on SSE: 600887, founded in 1993 in Hohhot, reporting about US$15.8 billion of revenue and working from 77 production bases in a global network. Youran Dairy is the Hong Kong-listed dairy farming platform on HKEX: 09858 associated with it, and it is the vehicle through which the group reaches its pastures and its cows.
Why Adding The Two Would Double Count. The revenue being scored belongs to the entity that reports it. A large share of the raw milk Youran produces is sold into Yili's processing system, so adding Youran's milk sales to Yili's dairy revenue counts the same litre twice, once as a farm sale and once as a finished dairy product. The same discipline keeps a subsidiary from inheriting a parent's Fortune Global 500 membership: ownership does not move a revenue line from one set of accounts into another. Merging them here would also produce a number no auditor would sign, because the group's published accounts already eliminate sales between the two.
Where The Physical Capacity Is Credited. The 40 percent dimension is read at the level of the assets a company controls, and it is counted once. Yili's own system covers more than 80 large modern pastures and 77 production bases, while the platform that owns and milks the herd reports a dairy herd in the range of 500,000 to 550,000 cows and more than three million tonnes of its own raw milk a year, which is one of the largest owned dairy cattle positions in the world. That is why the farming arm is named on this page rather than folded silently into the parent: the pastures and the cows are a real asset of the group, and they belong to the entity that holds them.
Why Yili Scores 82. Yili's revenue of about US$15.8 billion is roughly half the US$32.2 billion entry line for the 90 band, so the top of the table is closed to it by the same rule that closes it to every producer here. Its product mix is dairy rather than meat or eggs, which shapes how the purity weight reads a company whose processing is the larger half of its business, and the farming capacity behind its milk sits in a separate listed vehicle that cannot be consolidated into the score. Eighty-two places it with Wens, BRF and Danish Crown: substantial owned production and substantial revenue, without the tonnage lead or the revenue line of the top two.
The Judgement. Scoring a dairy group and its upstream farming platform as one company would make the numbers on this page unauditable and would count the same litre of milk twice, once inside the farm and once inside the factory. Scoring them separately keeps two distinct facts visible: Yili is one of the largest dairy processors in the world with a contracted farm base behind it, and Youran Dairy is one of the largest owned dairy herds in the world selling most of its milk into that processing system. Neither fact is as large as the sum of the two figures, and the sum is the one number this page will not print.
Biosecurity and compliance enter the owned-production dimension as capital and as cost rather than as a footnote: a filtered barn that keeps a virus out is an asset this index counts, and a market that moves because of an outbreak is the reason that asset earns what it earns. Three events from 2025 and 2026 on this page show the two directions that risk travels, and none of them is a hypothetical.
Disease That Lifts The Price. Cal-Maine Foods holds 51.8 million laying hens across 49 layer farms, 50 packing plants, 30 feed mills and two hatcheries, and sold more than 1.1 billion dozen eggs on US$4.262 billion of revenue. It also earned US$1.220 billion of net profit on that revenue, a margin near 28.6 percent, in a year when highly pathogenic avian influenza removed enough laying capacity nationally to push egg prices far above the cost of production. The structure amplified the effect: 63.3 percent of volume is conventional shell eggs sold at market prices, and 36.7 percent is specialty, cage-free, organic and selenium-enriched product that carries a higher margin whatever the cycle does. The following year is the other half of the story, with revenue falling back to about US$2.91 billion as prices normalised, and 2026 also brought a settlement with the US Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general over supply and pricing during the outbreak. A single-category Manufacturer that rides a disease-driven price spike meets the market and the regulator in the same season.
Disease That Reshapes The Asset. African swine fever is the reason Muyuan's pig houses are multi-storey, air-filtered and tightly clustered instead of spread across rented sites, and that capital is inseparable from a reported complete cost of production below RMB 13 per kilogram. The same concentration carries a risk that belongs inside the dimension: 100 percent of revenue is earned in China, so a regional movement ban or a cull is not offset by a second market, and a herd of the size Muyuan runs can be touched by one provincial event. Its 128.9 percent rise in slaughter volume to 28.663 million head is itself a biosecurity strategy, because sending its own animals through its own abattoirs cuts the number of points at which a pathogen can enter the chain.
Compliance Risk That Travels With Capital. JBS proposed a US$2.5 billion plant in Nigeria and met legal challenges from environmental organisations over deforestation and permitting before construction was finished, which turns the geography of expansion into a live exposure on a US$86.2 billion revenue base. Traceability requirements follow the same logic inside existing operations, where a certified antibiotic-free or pasture-based programme run by Danish Crown or Fonterra is a documentation cost per tonne and a premium at the point of sale at the same time.
The Judgement. The 40 percent weight cannot be read as a pure property count, because two barns with identical square metres are not worth the same to a Manufacturer that has to keep a virus out. A single-owner, filter-equipped, vertically closed asset supports a stronger biosecurity protocol than a dispersed network of third-party housing, and that difference separates a company that can hold its cost per kilogram from one that is simply long the price. Compliance risk pushes the other way, since it is charged against the next plant rather than the last one, which is why a company can hold the largest owned capacity in the category and still carry an unresolved legal question over the next US$2.5 billion it spends.
