China Growing Pigs in Huge High Rise Buildings

These "towers of pigs" are absolutely massive.

Pig Million

China is constructing giant towers with dozens of stories to farm pigs, The New York Times reports, in a massive drive to get the country's animal supplies caught up with demand and stabilize prices in the country.

The small rural town of Ezhou in central China, for instance, constructed a behemoth 26-story pig tower with the goal of producing over a million pigs per year.

The animals' food is carried to the top floor via a conveyor belt. Feeding troughs then automatically dispense perfectly sized meals based on how mature the pigs are.

Other parts of the country are also resorting to building pig condos. For instance, a newly-constructed pig tower in the Yaji mountains was designed to breed over 1,200 pigs on each of its 12 floors, as The Guardian reported in November.

Vertical Farming

Pork is a huge deal in China. In fact, according to the NYT, the country consumes half of the world's pig meat.

Yet "China’s current pig breeding is still decades behind the most advanced nations," Zhuge Wenda, the president of Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry, the company behind the Ezhou farm, told the newspaper. "This provides us with room for improvement to catch up."

Meanwhile, trade disputes and disruptions are making it difficult for the country to keep up with its food supply and agriculture.

And as residents move to cities, they're no longer raising pigs in their backyards. The number of pig farms has plummeted 75 percent since 2007, the NYT  notes.

As a result, the country's pork industry has seen several boom-or-bust cycles over the years.

And that's where the vertical pig farms come in. With a stockpile of available pork, industry leaders are looking to stabilize the market in a very big way.

READ MORE: China’s Bid to Improve Food Production? Giant Towers of Pigs. [The New York Times]

More on pork: China Now Producing Cloned Pigs Using Only Robots