Is there such a thing as disease-free animal agriculture?
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Animal Agriculture & Climate Change
October 2020

“On each floor, we can breed 1,270 pigs... but in the future with the design of the new buildings, we plan to have 1,300 pigs per floor.”

What we are looking at is the tallest pig farm in the world; units up to nine storeys high housing thousands of pigs...

China claims to be dealing with the health-risk factors that have become synonymous with its animal agriculture and wildlife trades.

The buildings do not even look like farms. They are huge grey concrete blocks, many storeys high, which stand side by side in the middle of what might look like a quarry, a “hole” of red earth dug in the heart of a mountain.

We are on the Yaji mountain, which in Chinese means “sacred”, a few kilometres south of the city of Guigang in southern China. What we are looking at is the tallest pig farm in the world; units up to nine storeys high housing thousands of pigs, with the construction of a 12-storey pig unit underway.

“On each floor, we can breed 1,270 pigs,” says Yuanfei Gao, vice-president of Yangxiang, the company that built the farm. “But in the future with the design of the new buildings, we plan to have 1,300 pigs per floor.”

Yangxiang is one of the Chinese giants of the pork industry, producing about 2 million pigs a year in a dozen farms throughout China. The Yaji mountain site is its largest and most advanced multistorey farming system and will have the capacity to produce around 840,000 pigs a year when construction is finished.

Over the past two years, Chinese farmers and consumers have been rocked by pandemic after the pandemic. Covid-19; an H1N1 swine flu that is now slowly spreading to farmworkers; African swine fever (ASF), which has led to as many as 200 million pig deaths in a year; and a highly pathogenic foot-and-mouth disease, also in pigs, that vets now say is endemic.

But here are sky-high standards of biosecurity and sophisticated cleaning and disposal systems. Is this, some hope, the answer?

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