MILLIONS of pigs are being raised for slaughter in new high-rise buildings the size of Big Ben across cities in China.
On the outskirts of Ezhou in the eastern Hubei Province, stands the world’s biggest free-standing pig farm.
The 26-storey building that resembles a concrete housing block towers above the rural village and is home to millions of pigs being raised for slaughter.
Horrifying images from inside show rows and rows of pigs crammed into individual pens barely wider than the animals themselves, with feeding tubes dumping food into the troughs in front of them.
Sows moved into the so-called “hog hotel” in 2022 when the high-rise was constructed, and the second building soon followed, with both reaching full capacity.
Jin Lin, general manager of the £500 million farm told Global Times that each building has floors covering 390,000 square meters and can produce 1.2 million pigs a year.
The animals are used for both their manure and their meat with China consuming half of the world’s pork and having little farmland.
The multi-storey pig farms see the animals carted into industrial sized lifts and sent to higher floors where they reproduce and are fattened up.
Each floor is dedicated to a different part of their life cycle with pregnant sows on one level, piglets on another, and mature hogs being prepared for the butcher on another.
Like in a factory, their feed is distributed throughout the site on a conveyor belt and automatically dumped into troughs; over a million pounds of feed is given to them every day.
Uniformed operatives who run the pig farm observe operations from a bizarre command centre surrounded by CCTV screens as they merge agriculture and technology to create an unusual urban farm.
Everything from ventilation to feeding the animals is controlled by operatives using monitors and they are given daily baths.
With over 800 members of staff, each employee is responsible for around 1,500 hogs in the high-living facility.
As well as tackling the demand for pork and farmland shortages, the facility uses innovative technology to help reduce the challenges associated with farming, such as water and energy consumption.
It “boasts labour efficiency, green ecology, and lower comprehensive cost” experts claim.
Future of farming
Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry built the farms alongside the company’s cement factory, and says the high-rise pig farms symbolise China’s ambitions for the industry.
Zhuge Wenda, the company’s president told The New York Times in 2023: “China’s current pig breeding is still decades behind the most advanced nations.
“This provides us with room for improvement to catch up.”
All of the feed is calculated and automatically distributed depending on the individual needs of the animals while their waste is collected and re-used.
But the huge complex has enraged animal lovers in China which prompted promoters to address concerns over sanitation and poor treatment, ensuring that the pigs have space to move.
Others have raised concerns about the spread of diseases not just among the animals but also to humans.
Dr Justine Butler, a senior researcher with vegan campaigning charity Viva, spoke on factory farms in 2020 saying that they are “a perfect storm.”
“We’re providing viruses with the perfect environment – factory farms, where animals are bred for fast growth, their immunity is low, and they’re kept in horrific conditions,” she said.
In 2018, giant Chinese pig farms caused outrage by setting fire to the animals to stop the spread of African swine flu that killed millions of the country’s pig population.
But Wenda claimed that this modern style of farming is better for the animals and they address biosecurity concerns.
He told Global Times: “Pigs are inherently clean animals. Each floor of the building is divided into various functional areas, making pig farming cleaner.”
“The waste water is treated on site,” said Zhuge he added in an interview with local Hubei television.
“In addition, our biosecurity control system, added to a scientific diet, makes it possible to improve the quality of the meat in order to meet the demand of the population for pork of a good standard and less expensive.”
Multi-storey ‘milestone’
Pig meat is so vital to China that in 2019, the State Council ruled that all government departments needed to support the pork industry including giving financial aid to boost large farms dedicated to pigs.
It was that year that Beijing said it would allow for multi storey farming which resulted in the urban high rise farms.
President Xi Jinping said: “A country must strengthen its agriculture before making itself a great power, and only a robust agriculture can make the country strong.”
The leader has prioritised agriculture warning that without self-reliance for food, China would “fall under others.”
The executive director of Yu’s Design Institute that designs the multi-story farms believes they will become an increasingly common sight.
Yu Ping told the NY Times: “This is a milestone and not only for China, because I think multistory farms will have an impact on the world.”
