Sky-high pig farms are emerging across China, where technicians in uniforms monitor pigs through high-resolution cameras, resembling a NASA command center.
At the end of September 2022, the first sows arrived at a 26-story skyscraper above a remote village in central China. Dozens of sows were herded into industrial elevators to higher floors. They will reside there from the time of fertilization until maturity. This is a pig farming facility in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging, and the supply of pork is urgent, according to the New York Times.
26-story pig farm in Yichou. (Photo: New York Times).
Inside the structure, resembling apartment complexes across China and towering like the Big Ben clock tower in London, technicians in uniforms monitor the pigs through high-resolution cameras akin to a NASA control center. Each floor operates as an independent farm for different stages in the life cycle of piglets, including areas for pregnant sows, birthing rooms, nursing spaces, and fattening areas for sows. Feeding is conducted via conveyor belts to the upper floors. Stored in massive silos, over 454,000 kg of feed is delivered to the lower floors each day through high-tech feeding troughs, automatically feeding pigs based on their life stage, weight, and health status.
The building, located in the suburbs of Yichou, a city on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, is the largest vertical pig farm in the world. A second skyscraper for pig farming will soon open. The first farm began operations in October last year. Once both buildings are fully operational this year, they are expected to raise up to 1.2 million pigs annually.
For decades, many rural families in China have raised pigs in their backyards. These useful livestock not only provide meat but also fertilizer. Pigs are a symbol of prosperity, as in the past, people only consumed pork on special occasions. Today, no country consumes more pork than China, which accounts for half of the world’s pork consumption.
In recent years, dozens of industrialized pig farms have emerged throughout China as part of a government effort to reduce meat prices. Built by the modern animal management company Zhongxin Kaiwei Hubei, the Yichou farm symbolizes China’s ambition to modernize pork production. “The pig farming industry in China is still decades behind most developed countries,” said Zhuge Wenda, the company’s president. “This motivates us to improve and catch up.”
The Yichou farm operates like a Foxconn factory for pigs, with precision akin to an iPhone production line. Even pig waste is measured, collected, and reused. About a quarter of it is discharged as dry manure, which can be repurposed into methane gas for electricity production.
As China modernizes with hundreds of millions moving from rural areas to urban centers, small pig farms are gradually disappearing. The number of pig farms in China producing fewer than 500 pigs per year has decreased by 75% from 2007 to 2020, dropping to around 21 million, according to an industry report. The shift to mega-farms began in earnest in 2018 when African swine fever devastated China’s pig farming industry, eliminating an estimated 40% of the domestic pig population.
Brett Stuart, founder of Global AgriTrends, a market research firm, stated that skyscraper pig farms and other giant pig farms heighten the biggest risk facing China’s pig farming industry: disease. Raising too many pigs in one facility complicates infection control. According to him, U.S. pork producers spread out their farms to mitigate biosecurity risks.
