High-Rise Pig Farms: China's Future?

Chinese high-tech companies' experimentation with factory-style approaches to pig-farming are getting an extra boost as China grapples with African swine fever, a deadly virus that is roiling the country's massive pork industry. Feed company New Hope Group has a plan to increase its swine production ten-fold in four years, and competitor DBN plans to boost production to 10 million head by 2021--up from 1.68 million head in 2018. Alibaba and Netease are incorporating digital technology into pig farming.

One company has gained attention for its complex of high-rise "pig hotels" deep in the mountains of Guangxi Province that have attracted dozens of foreign journalists, industry experts and politicians since they were constructed in 2017. The company's latest publicity scheme invited a group of scientists from Chinese research institutes and universities to conduct a "scientific assessment" of their high-rise high-tech pig complex this month.

Pig farm with four high-rise barns for pigs nestled 

in the mountains of China's Guangxi Province.

According to an online article entitled, "The Future Pig Farm Has Arrived!" Yangxiang Ltd Co. constructed their pig farm complex in the mountains 150 km east of the Guangxi Provincial capital on a site located in 2,667 hectares designated for forest use with no other farms for miles around. The farm is designed to form a closed channel from materials to farm to consumer.  It has separate access roads designated for pigs entering and exiting the farm, for people, materials, and waste, a separate living area for workers, and three feed mills. Two 11-story buildings and two 9-story buildings house up to 30,000 sows, great-grandparent and grandparent breeding stock. Two floors in each building are used for ventilation and manure-handling equipment. Each floor is a separate enclosed unit accessed by elevators. The buildings are designed as a collection of enclosed barns stacked on top of one another with minimal movement of air, people, or pigs between floors. The facility is enclosed to minimize disease transmission by rats, mosquitoes, and birds.

Diagram illustrates one-way flow of materials into 3 small feed mills, 4 digitized barns, slaughter, and supermarket. 

Apart from its high-rise buildings the company touts the efficiency of its use of artificial intelligence and its FPF (Future Pig Farm/Factory) system developed by partner company Yingzi (Shadow) Technology. FPF utilizes facial recognition and handheld devices to track pigs, adjust feed and environmental conditions and correlate performance with genetic make-up of animals. Pig Progress magazine described a presentation of FPF by Yingzi's CEO last year who acknowledged developers are still tackling problems such as pigs' reluctance to sit still to pose for photos to be fed into the system.

Yangxiang Co. also claims that its high-rise pig farm has "social benefits" by treating urine and manure with an anhydrous system that eliminates smell and turns the waste into organic fertilizer.

Yangxiang also has a multi-story boar farm in Liaoning Province, thousands of miles from its Guangxi farm complex.

The "assessment" by the scientist group included vague endorsements of the company's "strong independent innovation" and practical use of FPF technology. The high-rise cluster concept was praised for overcoming China's shortage of land, addressing its "arduous" disease prevention challenges, and introducing "green," "intelligent" methods to boost the country's pork industry. There was no mention of how much the scientists were paid to deliver this assessment.

The company claims to have achieved a 92.7 percent survival rate for its swine, 28.8 pigs per sow, and a production cost of 10.62 yuan per kg (about US$70/100lbs). Recent analyses published in the New York Times and in Slate magazine questioned China's infatuation with artificial intelligence as a panacea for agriculture and raised questions about the feasibility of these technologies on pig farms. An industry expert noted that benefits of facial recognition are marginal while the cost of photographing pigs far exceeds the cost of ear tags currently used and facial recognition does not aid in tracking pieces of the pigs beyond the slaughterhouse. The cost of trucking massive amounts of feed materials to mountaintop farms, trucking out the pigs/pork, and attracting workers willing to be confined inside a remote compound for weeks at a time has not been discussed. A video of the farm shows three human workers are needed to herd a dozen piglets down a corridor and into an elevator.

The description of the Yangxiang high-rise farm insists that China must adopt innovative pig-farming models equal to those in Europe and North America. It notes that African swine fever has dealt the industry a blow that leaves it "unrecognizable." Factory-style models uncoupled from traditional village-based agriculture appear to pose an antithesis to the thesis of small-scale backyard farms that still dominate China's pig-farming sector. The upheaval of African swine fever appears to be a catalyst that may bring forth some type of synthesis, but the process may get messy. Industry and government leaders have too many objectives to be achieved simultaneously: achieving biosecurity, treating and utilizing waste, raising productivity, reducing costs, and...avoiding reliance on imports of genetic stock and feeds. Chinese leaders seem to place their hope in technology as a magical panacea.

The Yangxiang assessment described the beginning of its high-rise farming project in 2013 as "the first step in a Long March." During the 1930s-era "Long March" communist rebels fled populated regions of southeast China and spent years winding through rugged terrain of remote regions in western China, randomly ending up sojourning in an impoverished northwestern region where they bided their time. That may be a good metaphor for the country's 21st-century pork industry.