Impact of African Swine Fever Epidemic on the Cost Intensity of Pork Production in China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors, congratulations with the interesting paper. After carefuly reading the manuscript I find it interesting ,relevant and under the scope of a journal. Althouagh there are some drawbacks which should be addressed before the publication.
1) A literature review part should be augmented. The current state of a literature review fails to provide a solid theoreticla background of a research. The scientific gap whihc this paper aims to address also lacks in substantiation.
2) The rationale of the selection of the research method (section 2.3) should be more detail. For now it seems, that authors decided to use currently employed research tool without any scientific argumentation.
3) Conclusions should provide more deep theoretical implications.
4) Resuots should be juxtaposed with current theoretical streams.
Author Response
Dear Editor and Reviewers:
We would like to thank the reviewers for carefully reading our manuscript (Manuscript ID: agriculture-2181438). We appreciated the reviewers’ constructive and insightful comments very much. In the following, we include a point-by-point response to the comments from reviewer 1. In the revised manuscript, all the changes have been marked in “Track Changes” function.
Point 1: A literature review part should be augmented. The current state of a literature review fails to provide a solid theoretical background of a research. The scientific gap which this paper aims to address also lacks in substantiation.
Response 1: Thanks for your suggestion. We have added a literature review part in the revised manuscript. In addition, we have added some theories such as the theory of economies of scale, productive efficiency theory, and farmer behavior theory in the literature review part. Moreover, we have added the scientific gap which this paper aims to address in the last paragraph of the literature review part.
Point 2: The rationale of the selection of the research method (section 2.3) should be more detail. For now, it seems, that authors decided to use currently employed research tool without any scientific argumentation.
Response 2: Thanks for your advice. We have added more details on the selection of research method in the revised manuscript. The specific details are “The stochastic frontier production function is most widely used in parametric methods, and it has also been extended in much literature with many different functional forms [51-58]. In this study, we follow the recommendations in current literature [38,48,55-56,59] and adopt the trans-log production function, which is a very flexible functional form and is a second-order approximation of any unknown function. Moreover, this model permits the estimation of both technical change in the stochastic frontier and time-varying technical inefficiencies with scaling property [37,55-56]”.
Point 3: Conclusions should provide more deep theoretical implications.
Response 3: Thanks for your suggestion. We have added more deep theoretical implications in Conclusions of the revised manuscript.
Point 4: Results should be juxtaposed with current theoretical streams.
Response 4: Thanks for your advice. We have modified some parts in Results of the revised manuscript so that the results can be juxtaposed with current theoretical streams.
We tried our best to improve the manuscript and hope that the correction will meet with your approval. Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. I wish you have a nice day!
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
The presented for evaluation manuscript is very interesting and the research topic is extremely important and current for the production of hog. African Swine Fever is a big problem for pig farms and pig farming, in general.
The paper is written in a coherent, clear language, making it easy for the reader to understand.
Detailed notes:
- can authors add a short description of the province, e.g. the size of animal production in this area, etc.?
- are data for 2021-2022 available? if so, maybe it's worth including them in the analysis?
- what does it mean - "the total number of samples is 660, of which 110 are small-scale...", please explain
After taking into account the comments, the manuscript can be published.
Best regards
Author Response
Dear Editor and Reviewers:
We would like to thank the reviewers for carefully reading our manuscript (Manuscript ID: agriculture-2181438). We appreciated the reviewers’ constructive and insightful comments very much. In the following, we include a point-by-point response to the comments from reviewer 2. In the revised manuscript, all the changes have been marked in “Track Changes” function.
Point 1: can authors add a short description of the province, e.g., the size of animal production in this area, etc.?
Response 1: Thanks for your suggestion. We have added a new Table 1 to describe the size of pork production and its share of the whole China in 2020 for the 22 sample provinces in the revised manuscript.
Point 2: are data for 2021-2022 available? if so, maybe it's worth including them in the analysis?
Response 2: Thanks for your advice. It is a pity that the data for 2021-2022 is not available so far. However, we will continue to monitor the data for 2021-2022 in future studies.
Point 3: what does it mean - "the total number of samples is 660, of which 110 are small-scale...", please explain.
Response 3: Thanks a lot for your comment. And thank you for letting us find out that there is an error in this sentence. We have revised this sentence to “The total number of samples is 660, with 220 samples for small-scale farms, medium-scale farms, and large-scale farms, respectively, as there are 22 provinces with 10 years of data for each scale” in the revised manuscript. This statement means that there are 22 sample provinces in this study, and each province has ten years of data and three different scales of farms, so the total sample size is 22*10*3=660.
We tried our best to improve the manuscript and hope that the correction will meet with your approval. Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. I wish you have a nice day!
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The article addresses the important and timely issue of the impact of the African Swine Fever Epidemic in China. Methodologically, the article is prepared correctly. The appropriate indicators and methodology used allow conclusions to be drawn. The main comments are:
1. The title of the article is incorrectly worded. I believe it would sound better as: Impact of African Swine Fever Epidemic on the cost intensity of pork production in China.
2. There is little information in the introduction about the scale of the ASF problem in China. What percentage of farms have been affected by ASF?
3.The description of the breakdown of farms is vague. What does it mean "Considering farms of various scales, the CAPCBC defines small-scale farms and medium-scale farms as those raising 30 to 100 hogs and 100 to 1,000 hogs, respectively, and large-scale farms are those raising more than 1,000 hogs"? Are these farms raising only fattening pigs? Is it the average state of fattening pigs per year? Is it the number of fattening pigs sold from the farm? This needs to be clarified. What about farms raising sows and producing piglets?
Author Response
Dear Editor and Reviewers:
We would like to thank the reviewers for carefully reading our manuscript (Manuscript ID: agriculture-2181438). We appreciated the reviewers’ constructive and insightful comments very much. In the following, we include a point-by-point response to the comments from reviewer 3. In the revised manuscript, all the changes have been marked in “Track Changes” function.
Point 1: The title of the article is incorrectly worded. I believe it would sound better as: Impact of African Swine Fever Epidemic on the cost intensity of pork production in China.
Response 1: Thanks for pointing out the mistake and your suggestion. We have changed the title of the article to “Impact of African Swine Fever Epidemic on the cost intensity of pork production in China” in the revised manuscript.
Point 2: There is little information in the introduction about the scale of the ASF problem in China. What percentage of farms have been affected by ASF?
Response 2: Thanks a lot for your comment. It is well known that the ASF has had a huge impact on China's hog industry, but there are no official statistics and releases on the percentage of farms affected by ASF. However, according to our group's survey of 16 counties in 8 provinces in China in 2019, we found that most farms were directly or indirectly affected by ASF. The direct impact on farms is the infection of hogs with ASF, while the indirect impact on farms is manifested by the need for high-temperature granulation, fumigation disinfection, and sealed transportation of feed, as well as strengthening epidemic prevention measures, etc. We have added the above information in the revised manuscript.
Point 3: The description of the breakdown of farms is vague. What does it mean "Considering farms of various scales, the CAPCBC defines small-scale farms and medium-scale farms as those raising 30 to 100 hogs and 100 to 1,000 hogs, respectively, and large-scale farms are those raising more than 1,000 hogs"? Are these farms raising only fattening pigs? Is it the average state of fattening pigs per year? Is it the number of fattening pigs sold from the farm? This needs to be clarified. What about farms raising sows and producing piglets?
Response 3: Thanks for your advice. According to the explanation of the main indicators of the farming and livestock products in the appendix of the CAPCBC, these farms are partly raising only fattening pigs, and partly are raising both sows and fattening pigs. The number of pigs counted on each farm is the sum of the number of fattening pigs sold from the farm and the net increase of fattening pigs on the farm during the survey period, while piglets, boars and sows for breeding are not included in the statistics. It is the average state of fattening pigs per year. We have added the above explanations in the revised manuscript.
We tried our best to improve the manuscript and hope that the correction will meet with your approval. Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. I wish you have a nice day!
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
