China’s multi-storey hog hotels elevate industrial farms to new levels

YAJI MOUNTAIN, CHINA: On Yaji Mountain in southern China, they are checking in the sows a thousand head per floor in highrise ‘hog hotels’.

Privately owned agricultural company Guangxi Yangxiang Co Ltd is running two seven-floor sow breeding operations, and is putting up four more, including one with as many as 13 floors that will be the world’s tallest building of its kind.

Hog farms of two or three floors have been tried in Europe.

Some are still operating, others have been abandoned, but few new ones have been built in recent years, because of management difficulties and public resistance to large, intensive farms.

Now, as China pushes ahead with industrialisation of the world’s largest hog herd, part of a 30-year effort to modernise its farm sector and create wealth in rural areas, companies are experimenting with high-rise housing for pigs despite the costs.

The ‘hotels’ show how far some breeders are willing to go as China overhauls its farming model.

“There are big advantages to a high-rise building,” said Xu Jiajing, manager of Yangxiang’s mountain-top farm.

“It saves energy and resources. The land area is not that much but you can raise a lot of pigs.” Companies like Yangxiang are pumping more money into the buildings – about 30 per cent more than on single-storey modern farms – even as hog prices in China hold at an eight-year low.

For some, the investments are too risky.

Besides low prices that have smaller operations culling sows or re-thinking expansion plans, there is worry about diseases spreading through such intensive operations.

But success for high-rise pig farms in China could have implications across densely populated, land- scarce Asia, as well as for equipment suppliers.

“We see an increasing demand for two- or three-level buildings,” said Peter van Issum, managing director of Microfan, a Dutch supplier that designed Yangxiang’s ventilation system.

Microfan also supplied a threestorey breeding operation, Daedeok JongDon GGP Farm, in South Korea.

“The higher ones are still an exception, but the future might change rapidly,” van Issum said.

Yaji Mountain seems an unlikely location for a huge breeding farm.

Up a narrow road, away from villages, massive concrete pig buildings overlook a valley of dense forest that Yangxiang plans to develop as a tourist attraction.

The site, however, is relatively close to Guigang, a city with a river port and waterway connections to the Pearl River Delta, one of the world’s most densely populated regions.

While Beijing is encouraging more livestock production in China’s grain basket in the northeast, many worry that farms there will struggle to get fresh pork safely to big cities thousands of miles away. — Reuters