GEEKY | CHINA | PIG FARMS | MEAT CONSUMPTION | CONSUMERISM

You Get a Break Once a Week in This Farm

From slaughtering thousands of pigs

The Guardian serves as an inspiration of stories for me. In its latest article I read -see source at the end- I learned some very interesting stuff about China, the Chinese people and their obsession with pig meat.

The Chinese are voracious pig eaters. They consume roughly half the pigs in the world though they comprise ~18.50% of the global population. In fact they eat so much pork that supply cannot keep up with demand, so prices keep on rising.

China’s government wanted to put an end to that, and a certain cement Chinese company saw an opportunity in this. You see, cement prices have taken a slump lately. The business of cement is not as profitable as it was, so the company Zhongxin Kaiwei decided to invest big in pig farming.

I am not talking about a run of the mill farm with a few hundreds of pigs though. Nope. The Chinese are many, so they think big. They are building two 26-storey skyscraper farms, one next to the other, with the capacity to slaughter up to 1.2 million pigs per year.

These are, by far, the largest mega-farms in the world. You can see both mega-farms here (Baidu’s header image does not have a caption clarifying its license). As you can see one of them is complete and the one behind it is almost ready.

When fully operational they’ll have a combined area of 800,000 sq meters (8,610,000 sq feet) of space, with a capacity for 650,000 animals. The $557 million farm also has “gas, temperature and ventilation-controlled conditions, with animals fed through more than 30,000 automatic feeding spots at the click of a button in a central control room.”

But what struck me most in Guardian’s article is that -according to their Baidu source (in Chinese)- workers will stay the entire week in the mega-farms/factories. I assume something was lost in translation, since the Guardian says ‘once a week break’, not day-off. Or they wrote it that way to specify that workers can only leave the site once a week.

Even so, forcing the workers to stay -and, apparently, sleep- inside 24 hours per day for at least 6 days is unprecedented. The price of Chinese pork rose further after the deadly pig disease African swine fever (ASF) between 2018 and 2020, where 100 million pigs died (from the disease of from culling).

One reason they apparently force the workers to be also residents is due to the extensive disinfection and testing they need to go through before being given clearance to enter. The pigs will be so tightly packed that if one gets sick they probably all will.

Even so, even if the money was good (I doubt it will be spectacular), this means no social life at all for the workers/residents of this ‘farm.’ The average and lowest salaries have been rising in China over the years due to their rise of quality of life and GDP growth.

Soon they might need to import immigrants from poorer Asian countries for the lowest paying jobs, just like the West has done for decades. When that happens -probably before China becomes the world’s largest economy- China will be a de jure ‘First world country’ too, though de facto it already is.

“Welcome to the Big Boys guys! What? No, you may not have our pigs! Get your own pigs!”

Experts worry that mega-farms like those -China is building 64 more of those pigscrapers in the south-western Sichuan province alone- will be massive disease vectors due to millions of pigs in such a tight space.

No matter how well they disinfect the workers and have them work 24/6 under Big Brother conditions one virus is all that it takes. Apart from the workers a single sick pig showing no disease symptoms might be enough to infect all others.

The conditions of the farm might also be ideal for weak viruses to mutate into more deadly forms. So massive pig farms like those might turn out to be a very bad idea in the future.

The Chinese are trying to tame their chaotic and largely unchecked animal markets which gave rise to Covid by going bigger and more controlled. But this might have the opposite effect.

I suppose this article will probably fill with horror most vegetarians and vegans among you. It is enough to turn me into a vegetarian, and I’m already on the verge. I eat meat just once a week, and I’m thinking of ditching that as well.

I might switch to eating fish and chicken only -occasionally- and from red meat eat only bacon (I cannot live without the bloody thing). Thinking that some of this bacon being sold in my country might be derived from such monstrous farms in the future fills me with dread though.. 😨

Anyway, that’s a wrap everyone. Let me know in the comments what do you think of such mega-farms, no matter your dietary habits. Is China being sensible or are they building the foundations for more pandemics?

source / prompted by: China’s 26-storey pig skyscraper ready to slaughter 1 million pigs a year | The Guardian

Another article by Nikolaos Skordilis:

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