The first sows arrived in late September at the massive 26-story tower towering over a rural village in central China. The female pigs were taken dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the upper floors where the pigs would live from insemination to maturity.
This is pig farming in China, where arable land is scarce, food production lags, and pork supply is a strategic must.
Inside the massive building, which resembles the monolithic apartment blocks seen across China and is as tall as London’s tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center with high-resolution cameras. Each floor functions as a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant piglets, a room for farrowing piglets, spaces for nursing and space for fattening the young pigs.
Feed is transported on a conveyor belt to the top floor where it is collected in huge tanks that deliver more than a million pounds of feed daily to the floors below through high-tech feeders that automatically dispense the feed to the pigs based on their stage of life, weight and health.
The building on the outskirts of Ezhou, a city on the south bank of the Yangtze River, is being hailed as the world’s largest free-standing pig farm, with a second identical high-rise for pigs opening soon. The first farm started operations in October and once both buildings reach full capacity later this year, it is expected to raise 1.2 million pigs per year.
China has a long love affair with pigs. For decades, many rural Chinese households raised backyard pigs, which were considered valuable livestock not only as a source of meat but also as fertilizer. Pigs also have cultural significance as a symbol of prosperity, as historically pork was only served on special occasions.
But pork prices are higher than in other major nations where pig farming was industrialized long ago. In recent years, dozens more industrial mammoth pig farms have sprung up across China as part of Beijing’s efforts to fill this gap.
Built by Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry, a cement maker-turned-pig farmer, Ezhou Farm stands as a monument to China’s ambitions to modernize pork production.
“China’s current pig farming is still decades behind the most advanced nations,” said Zhuge Wenda, president of the company. “That gives us room for improvement to catch up.”
The farm is located next to the company’s cement factory in a region of the country known as the “Land of Fish and Rice” due to its importance in Chinese cuisine, with its fertile fields and surrounding waters.
A pig farm in name, the facility actually resembles a Foxconn pig factory with the precision required for an iPhone production line. Even pig faeces are measured, collected and reused. About a quarter of the feed will come out as dry excrement, which can be reused as methane to generate electricity.
Six decades after a famine killed tens of millions, China still lags behind most developed countries in efficient food production. China is the largest importer of agricultural commodities, including more than half of the world’s soybeans, mostly for animal feed. It has about 10 percent of the planet’s arable land for about 20 percent of the world’s population. Its crops cost more and its farmland yields less corn, wheat and soybeans per acre than other major economies.
The shortcomings have become even more apparent in recent years than Trade disputes with the US, pandemic-related supply disruptions And the war in Ukraine underscored China’s potential risk to food security. In a keynote speech in December, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, called agricultural self-employment a priority.
“A country must strengthen its agriculture before becoming a great power, and only robust agriculture can make the country strong,” Mr Xi said. In the past, he has warned that if we don’t hold onto our rice bowl, China “would fall under the control of others.”
And no protein is more important to the Chinese rice bowl than pork. The State Council, China’s cabinet, issue decree in 2019 stated that all government agencies must support the pork industry, including financial aid for larger pig farms. That same year, Beijing also said it would allow multi-story farming, allowing pig farming to go vertical to raise more pigs on relatively smaller lots.
“This is a milestone, not just for China, because I think multi-storey farms will have an impact on the world,” said Yu Ping, executive director of Yu’s Design Institute, a company that designs pig farms.
As China has modernized and hundreds of millions of people have moved from the countryside to the urban centers, small backyard farms have disappeared. The total number of pig farms in China producing fewer than 500 pigs a year has fallen 75 percent since 2007 to about 21 million in 2020, according to an industry report.
The shift toward mega-farms accelerated in 2018 as African swine fever devastated and wiped out China’s pork industry. according to some estimates40 percent of its pig population.
Brett Stuart, founder of Global AgriTrends, a market research firm, said hog towers and other giant hog farms are exacerbating the biggest risk facing China’s pork industry: disease. Rearing so many pigs together in a single facility makes it more difficult to prevent contamination. He said major US pork producers are spreading out their farms to reduce biosecurity risk.
“US pig farmers look at the pictures of these farms in China and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare,'” Mr Stuart said. “It’s just too risky.”
But if Pork prices have tripled in a yearcoupled with Beijing’s support for big pig farms, the rewards seemed to outweigh the risk. A construction boom ensued, and a supply-constrained market was overwhelmed with available pigs. Pork prices have gone down about 60 percent from the highs of 2019. China’s pork industry is characterized by bitcoin-like volatility, undergoing boom-or-bust cycles that yield huge profits or losses depending on wild price swings.
Last month, Jiangxi Zhengbang Technology, a giant hog producer that has been expanding rapidly in recent years, said it had been warned about it it can be delisted from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange over concerns that the company is insolvent.
“The government hopes that the consolidation will make prices more predictable and less volatile over time,” said Pan Chenjun, executive director of RaboResearch’s food and agriculture division. “That is the ultimate goal.”
In rural villages where backyards once dotted the land, mega farms are springing up. Three years ago, when the real estate and infrastructure sectors began to shrink, Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei decided to use a neighboring property and apply its construction know-how to enter a business with better growth prospects. It invested $600 million to build the high-rise pig farms, with another $900 million earmarked for a nearby meat processing plant.
His background in cement is useful in pig farming, the company said. With the existing employees, she built a space-saving high-rise building made of reinforced concrete. It uses excess heat from the cement factory to provide the pigs with hot baths and warm drinking water. According to Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei, this will help the pigs grow faster with less feed.
Little backyard pig farmers have a hard time keeping up with this type of scale.
Qiao Yuping, 66, and her husband raise about 20 to 30 pigs a year in northeast China’s Liaoning Province. When pork prices fell last year, she said they didn’t make any money. She said it’s hard to ignore the impact of mega-farms, which are driving up feed and vaccine prices for the animals.
“Everything has gone up in price,” Ms. Qiao said. “How can we not be affected?”
