Inside the hi-tech megafarms transforming China’s pork production
China is switching from family farms with backyard pigpens to huge, automated businesses capable of rearing thousands of animals each year
Surrounded by mountains in a remote part of southwestern China, Xinguangan’s first large-scale, modern pig farm is getting ready to produce its first offspring.
By the end of the year, 10,000 sows will live inside two huge barns on this 73-hectare (180-acre) site, producing up to 280,000 piglets annually, or about 20,000 tonnes of pork.
The farm, big even by US standards, is one of a record number of large-scale projects that will be built in China this year as it shifts a big chunk of its pork production from backyard pig pens to automated, intensive hog barns of the kind widely used in the United States.
Some in the industry estimate it could build several hundred sow farms with about 5,000 to 8,000 head this year, even more than last year, accelerating the transformation of the world’s biggest pork industry.
Larger, more standardised farms are also paving the way to a more sophisticated market, with China approving this week a live hog futures contract to help farmers hedge price risks.
But there are also doubts about China’s ability to pull off such a rapid leap from age-old traditional methods to cutting-edge industrial production, given the shortage of experienced people and the high risk of disease.
“Industrialisation has never been this big before,” said Martin Jensen, executive partner at Carthage & MHJ Agritech Consulting, which runs large farms for Chinese clients and trains staff.