Vertical farming is an indoor technique that grows crops / poultry in vertically stacked layers, often in a controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) system. A Chinese company ‘Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Farming’ has built a 26-story skyscraper that can grow & slaughter 1.2 million pigs a year. This is the largest “single-building pig farm in the world” and is situated on the outskirts of Ezhou. This pig farm aims to meet the country’s growing demand for pork. The farm-in-the-sky will house more than 600,000 animals.
This 2.6 million sq. feet farm has advanced technology. Animals are automatically fed via buttons in a central control room, and the pigs’ waste is used to generate heating and power.
This development is simply unfathomable. In the olden days, say about 30 years ago, we could only have two or three in our backyard pigsty. The pigs raised in farms can be ready for sale in a few months, and in the backyard pigsty, it would take about a year to raise one. As the technology advances, this will be the trend in the future.
The workers will undergo high levels of testing and disinfection and may have to stay on-site for a week at a time. These developments indicate that the pig farming industry is heading towards a highly automatic and intelligent future, and the standards and threshold for pig farmers will become higher.
On the other hand, people are apprehensive of these developments. It is possible that the intensive facilities can reduce interactions between domesticated and wild animals and their diseases, but if a disease does get inside, they can break out between animals like wildfire. The higher density of animals, the higher risk of infectious pathogen spread and amplification, as well as potential for mutation.
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
