China’s bid to improve its food production? Giant towers of pigs

GLOBAL ECONOMY

Livestock inside Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei’s high-rise urban pig farm on the outskirts of Ezhou, China. The company’s goal is to raise around 25,000 pigs a year on each floor. HUBEI ZHONGXIN KAIWEI VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES

A 26-story building houses an urban pig farm on the outskirts of Ezhou, China. GILLES SABRIE — THE NEW YORK TIMES

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By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu

The New York Times

The first sows arrived in late September at the hulking, 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 resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition 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: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the hogs.

Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it’s collected in giant tanks that deliver more than 1 million pounds of food a day to the floors below through high-tech feeding 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, a city on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, is hailed as the world’s biggest free-standing pig farm with a second identical hog high-rise opening soon. The first farm started operating in October, and once both buildings reach full capacity this year, it is expected to raise 1.2 million pigs annually.

China has had a long love affair with pigs. 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 meat 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 other 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.

“China’s current pig breeding is still decades behind the most advanced nations,” said Zhuge Wenda, the company’s president. “This provides us with room for improvement.”

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 fertile farmlands and 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.

The shortcomings became more pronounced in the last few years when trade disputes with the United States, pandemic-related supply disruptions and the war in Ukraine underscored China’s potential food security risk. In a December policy address, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, called agricultural self-reliance a priority.

And no protein is more important for the Chinese rice bowl than pork. The State Council, China’s Cabinet, issued a decree in 2019 stating that all government departments needed to support the pork industry, including financial aid for more large-scale pig farms. In the same year, Beijing also said it would approve multistory farming, which allowed pig farming to go vertical to raise more hogs on relatively smaller parcels.

As China has modernized with hundreds of millions of people moving from the countryside to urban centers, small backyard farms have disappeared. The number of pig farms in China producing fewer than 500 hogs a year plunged 75% from 2007 to 2020, to around 21 million, according to an industry report.

Brett Stuart, founder of Global AgriTrends, a market research firm, said hog towers and other giant pig farms exacerbated the biggest risk facing China’s pork industry: disease. Raising so many pigs together in a single facility makes it harder to prevent contamination. He said large U.S. pork producers spread out their farms to reduce biosecurity risk.