Albion is a tiny town of rolling hills and kettle lakes in Indiana, two and a half hours from Indianapolis by car. These days, it’s also the site of a training program that sheds light on the changing nature of American agriculture: Chinese pig farmers have been traveling to Albion for lessons in breeding swine from a man named Mike Lemmon.

The $4.7 billion sale of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, to China’s Shuanghui International closed last week. The deal has highlighted China’s hunger for U.S. expertise in pork production; it has also raised concerns stateside about foreign threats to food safety and the U.S. economy. But it’s hardly the first Chinese foray onto American pig farms: for the past couple of years, Chinese companies have sent workers to study pig farming with people like Lemmon.

When doing business with Whiteshire Hamroc, a swine-genetics firm where Lemmon is chief executive, visitors stay at an apartment on the company’s farm—they are greeted by a fieldstone engraved with the logo of two grinning pigs—or at the home of Lemmon or his brother. Lemmon speaks fondly of the workers, at times with the air of a host welcoming foreign-exchange students: in the past, Jason Feng wouldn’t eat anything between two buns, had to have rice or noodles at least two meals a day, and doused his food with Mexican hot sauce. Sally Xie gobbled up local fare—“gravy, Dairy Queen: she ate it all”—and packed on twenty-one pounds after two weeks.

If you ask some of his Chinese friends, Lemmon’s unorthodox habits are just as startling. Once, on a visit to a breeding barn in China, where the temperature was close to freezing, Lemmon—dressed in shorts and a T-shirt—lay on the ground for ten minutes to test the airflow system, recalled Tao Yishan, the president of Tangrenshen, a big Chinese pork producer and processor. He wanted “to mimic the height of the piglets,” Tao said.

Lemmon, who lives just outside of Albion, has been fascinated with pigs since he began raising his own on the family farm as a child. He felt that he understood what made them tick, and loved to cuddle with them. Sometimes he fell asleep in their shed. “They were like my pets,” he said.

In college, after becoming interested in animal genetics, he and his brother Charlie experimented with on-farm artificial insemination, stocking up on ingredients to make their own semen extender, which preserves and dilutes the ejaculate to make more doses. (“The pharmacist thought we were crazy,” he recalled.) After Lemmon graduated from veterinary school in 1975, the brothers decided to focus on pig production.

In the subsequent decades, Whiteshire Hamroc developed a system to bring fresh air into barns and draw out germs. The company also began raising pigs for the medical industry, to be used for testing and developing drugs, and for regenerating human body parts such as lost fingertips.

Lemmon ticked off the ways in which swine help mankind: they end up in food, medical devices such as heart valves, pharmaceuticals, clothes, shoes, and nutritional supplements. He understands intimately that pigs can make a difference in the world: “Mother has a pig valve in her heart,” he told me.

Today, Whiteshire Hamroc is mostly in the business of breeding genetically desirable swine. After mating swine for traits like lean meat, the company sells the prized specimens, along with their semen, to pig producers who use these breeders to spawn their own herds.

In the U.S., that business is big but mature. So, in 1994, Lemmon visited China to find new customers. Soon, he was attending trade shows and educational seminars, where he made a name for himself and his company by teaching pork producers his techniques.

Lemmon has hosted about thirty Chinese workers since he started the program in 2008, and by next summer, he expects to bring in up to thirty people annually—some from the company’s Beijing unit, and others employed by Whiteshire Hamroc’s Chinese customers. Some companies pay Whiteshire Hamroc for the training; others get it for free, as part of a broader partnership. (Much bigger competitors, such as Iowa’s Choice Genetics, also offer training to the Chinese at their U.S. facilities.)

The pig is so central to the visitors’ culture that the Chinese character for “home” is signified by a pig under a roof. The most popular meat in Chinese cuisine is pork: char siu barbecue pork, Chairman Mao’s red-braised pork, lion’s-head meatballs. In the past, many peasants kept two pigs—one to eat and one to sell—feeding swine with scraps and vegetable trimmings; pigs were butchered on the farm. The meat didn’t travel far and was a rare treat, eaten on holidays. “It was like walking back into the nineteen-hundreds,” Lemmon recalled of his early trips to China.

But rising incomes have meant rising demand for meat, with the Chinese eating an average of eighty-six pounds of pork per person last year. More than half the world’s pigs are now raised in China—but it’s been harder to maintain their quality, compared with that in the U.S., said Altin Kalo, the chief economist at Steiner Consulting Group, a food-industry consultancy.

In recent years, the gap has been closing. Still, as China ramps up production and processing—trying to achieve in years what the U.S. developed in the course of decades—quality has sometimes slipped. Pork tainted with clenbuterol—a banned drug that boosts growth—sickened hundreds of people in 2011, and earlier this year, sixteen thousand dead pigs floated down the waterways of Shanghai.

“In general, the Chinese don’t have anywhere near the technological sophistication of U.S. pork production,” said Steve Meyer, the president of Paragon Economics, which analyzes the agricultural market. “They can learn a lot from relationships with U.S. companies.”

U.S. companies gain, too. During the recession and the years that have followed, there’s been less growth in U.S. pork consumption, which means American pork companies have to look elsewhere for growth. In the U.S., to gain market share, “we need to take a customer from someone else,” Lemmon told me. “In China, nearly every producer is a possible customer.”

On Lemmon’s sprawling farm, Chinese visitors learn how to take meticulous records: of the size of a litter, pig weights over their lifespan, genetic defects, and types of feed eaten, with varying amounts of corn, soybean meal, and vitamins. Using ultrasound machines, the workers measure, among other things, the depth of fat in a pig’s back.

On his first trip to Albion this month, Fire Zhang marvelled at the modern, organized production facilities. The twenty-eight-year-old grew up on a small farm outside of Chongqing, in southwest China, where his family used to raise pigs but doesn’t any longer. “We can’t make that much money,” said Zhang, whose unusual English moniker is a translation of his Chinese name, Wenhuo.

Now, he is training as a manager for Whiteshire Hamroc’s Beijing office, learning how to oversee farm workers to make sure pigs are treated humanely and schedules are carried out on time. In September, Whiteshire Hamroc flew him to Albion to learn about the farm and the company’s culture.

The Albion town-council minutes reflect the area’s enduring rural character: the issuance of a permit to trap muskrats in the sewer pond, the replacement of a well house destroyed by a runaway horse trailer. Local events this autumn include Apple Cider Press Day at the nearby Chain O’ Lakes State Park. Zhang said he loves the beautiful views and the local lifestyle.

Tao told me that by sending Tangrenshen workers for training in Albion, he wants them not only to learn breeding techniques, but also to expose them to the dedication and discipline of Whiteshire Hamroc workers. Next summer, a few miles from Albion, Tangrenshen and Whiteshire Hamroc will open a research-and-development farm together.

All of this may raise questions about whether it’s wise for U.S. pig-breeding companies to be giving so much information to Chinese businesses. The Chinese already send cargo ships of inexpensive clothes, toys, and electronics to the U.S.; should U.S. agriculture companies really be helping Chinese firms to produce pigs more cheaply and efficiently, and then to sell them on the global market? Should the U.S. instead put up barriers to protect American companies and workers from foreign interlopers?

Lemmon is unconvinced. “The Japanese, Koreans, and Germans build their cars here, and we’re building cars in China, Korea, and Europe,” he said. “I don’t see the difference.”

Vanessa Hua is a Steinbeck Fellow in creative writing at San Jose State University.

Photograph by John Gress/Reuters.