In step with the steppe

"It takes from six to seven months for the local sheep to be ready for an abattoir but for the hybrids, it's from four to five months."

Some 200 families reside in Angsu.

In the 1990s, Mengkebayaer, who is from the same village, was a musician with a Mongolian folk troupe in Dalian in Northeast China's Liaoning province. He got married and returned to Inner Mongolia in 2000, when his village didn't have electricity.

His siblings gave him 40 sheep to start his livestock business, and soon he saw profits roll in, he says.

His parents had settled down in Angsu in the 1940s, in the same decade the autonomous region came into begin.

"When I got married, I couldn't have imagined that my village would have electricity. Then we got it, then we got roads, and now online connectivity," Mengkebayaer, 44, says.

The first light bulbs were lit in Angsu in 2006.

He makes about 400,000 yuan a year from his various businesses that include livestock, diary items, corn and rice, and tourism.

"Irrigation can be controlled remotely" he says of the overhead water pipes fitted on farmlands in the banner.

He aims to register a trademark to sell his products online. Meanwhile, he plays the shudraga, a Mongolian instrument, when he gets the time.

Some ethnic Mongolians use lone names.

Roads, trucks

More than a decade ago, Angsu also witnessed the arrival of sowing machines. The village's Party chief, Suyalaqiqige, was among the early adopters, who used the machines to plant corn and rice. She was a traditional sheep herder in her teens.

While modernization of livestock management and agriculture may have made her life easier, it has led to the loss of human interaction, such as conversations with fellow herders when watching over their sheep. Nonetheless, the old way of grazing was time-consuming.