To serve China's rapidly growing urban middle class, who increase the country's demand both for meat and for higher-quality food, farmers and companies have attempted technological solutions to guarantee their products' freshness and safety.

The first major focus of the book is the "blockchain chicken farms" run by Bubuji (Chinese: 步步鸡), also known as GoGoChicken, a subsidiary of the technology arm of ZhongAn, China's largest insurance company.

Wang visits a farm in Guizhou owned by Jiang, a farmer who turned to GoGoChicken after sales for his free range chickens declined due to distrust of their provenance.

Though the blockchain chickens are profitable, selling for up to CN¥ 300 (US$43) to a market of upper-middle-class consumers, Jiang's enterprise sales dry up shortly after the first order, raising concerns about their long-term viability.

The book then addresses the African swine fever outbreak of the late 2010s, which killed a substantial share of pigs in China, the world's largest pork producer.

The book relates the Chinese government's attempts to improve educational standards in rural areas, where very few students complete high school or attend university.

Wang discusses the economic position of people involved in multi-level marketing, noting that the states with the highest proportion of direct sellers, North Dakota, Iowa, and Wyoming, all have above-average unemployment rates.

[16] Ling Ma similarly wrote in Wired that she "can't think of any other recent work that comes close to capturing the alternate reality that is China today", stating Blockchain Chicken Farm exemplified the nature and pace of Chinese technological advancement to the point of being reminiscent of science fiction.

[19][12] More mixed reviews included one by Publishers Weekly, whose staff writer described Blockchain Chicken Farm as "thought-provoking if inconclusive", praising its detail and unique subject matter but criticising its absence of a clear thesis.

Chu particularly focused on the same loose interpretation of shanzhai as de Seta, arguing that Wang misrepresented the concept to make it more amenable to free and open-source software culture.

She ultimately deemed Blockchain Chicken Farm "built on analogies as intellectual labor-saving shortcuts" and insufficient as any of memoir, technology reporting, or "speculative manifesto".

[9] Melody Jue, associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, covered it alongside AI in the Wild by Peter Dauvergne and A City Is Not a Computer by Shannon Mattern for American Literature.

She held up Blockchain Chicken Farm as one of extremely few books addressing artificial intelligence from the perspective of the Global South, juxtaposing its "more complex story of technology and agency" with that of works that treat developing countries and regions as "passive subject[s] of ecological damage".

The New York Times featured it alongside Barack Obama's memoir A Promised Land and Dark Archives, an exploration of books bound in human skin by Megan Rosenbloom.

[23] Literary Hub incorporated it in its "science, technology, and nature" recommendations for October 2020 amongst Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes and A Good Time to Be Born by Perri Klass.

[24] The Verge's 2023 reader-inspired list of "the best tech books of all time" featured Blockchain Chicken Farm, as well as Masters of Doom by David Kushner, The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly, and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.