China building hog high-rises
Towering farms constructed to boost production in nation that eats half of world’s pork
The first sows arrived in September at the 26-story high-rise towering above a rural village in central China. The female pigs were whisked away dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the higher floors where the hogs would reside from insemination to maturity.
This is pig farming in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging and pork supply is a strategic imperative.
Inside the edifice, which stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life.
Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it is collected in giant tanks that deliver more than 1 million pounds of food a day to the floors below through hightech troughs that automatically dispense the meal to the hogs based on their stage of life, weight and health.
The building, on the outskirts of Ezhou, is hailed as the world’s biggest free-standing pig farm, with a second identical hog highrise opening soon. The first farm started operating in October, and once both buildings reach full capacity this year, they are expected to raise 1.2 million pigs annually.
For decades, many rural Chinese households raised backyard pigs, considered valuable livestock as a source of not only meat but also manure. Pigs also hold cultural significance as a symbol of prosperity because, historically, pork was served only on special occasions.
Today, no country eats more pork than China, which consumes half the world’s pig meat. Pork prices are closely watched as a measure of inflation and carefully managed through the country’s strategic pork reserve — a government stockpile that can stabilize prices when supplies run low.
But pork prices are higher than in other major nations where pig farming went industrial a long time ago. In the last few years, dozens of mammoth industrialized pig farms have sprung up across China as part of Beijing’s drive to close that gap.
Built by Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry — a cement manufacturer turned pig breeder — the Ezhou farm stands like a monument to China’s ambition to modernize pork production.
The farm is next to the company’s cement factory, in a region known as the “Land of Fish and Rice” for its importance to Chinese cuisine with its fertile farmlands and surrounding bodies of water.
A pig farm in name, the operation is more like a Foxconn factory for pigs with the precision required of an iPhone production line. Even pig feces are measured, collected and repurposed. Roughly one-quarter of the feed will come out as dry excrement that can be repurposed as methane to generate electricity.
Six decades after a famine killed tens of millions of its people, China still trails most of the developed world when it comes to efficient food production. China is the biggest importer of agricultural goods, including more than half the world’s soybeans, mostly for animal feed. It has about 10% of the planet’s arable land for around 20% of the global population. Its crops cost more to produce and its farmlands yield less corn, wheat and soybean per acre than other major economies.