Pig farming moves into buildings, saving land and boosting efficiency
On November 7, the reporter came to Xinqiao Tun, Shangdu Town, Pingnan County, Guigang City, Guangxi Province, where two brand-new five-story buildings stood out——from a distance they looked like modern office towers, but up close what could be heard was a chorus of pig squeals.
It turned out that this was the special wild boar farm built by Zhou Qifeng, a young man from the county. He enthusiastically led the reporter upstairs for a tour. Although it was a pig farm, it did not reek like a traditional pig farm; the floors of the pig pens were clean, and the farm had a clear division of labor. The first floor was the piglet growing room, and the second floor housed the farrowing rooms and nursery rooms, among others. After sows became pregnant on the third floor, they would “take” the elevator to the second floor to give birth; before weaning, the piglets were fed in the nursery rooms on the second floor, and after weaning they would “take” the elevator to the first floor to be raised. In this pig building, more than 1,400 wild boars enjoyed the treatment of living in apartments and “riding” a dedicated elevator. The elevator was actually a lift; workers drove the sows into the elevator, closed the gate to secure the pigs, pressed the switch, and the sows descended steadily from the third floor to the second floor.
Most other people's pigs are raised in pigsties, but Zhou Qifeng's wild boars enjoyed “superior treatment.” Zhou Qifeng told the reporter: “The first advantage of raising pigs in buildings is intensive land use; one building can accommodate more than 500 breeding sows, equivalent to a pig farm of dozens of mu; second, because there is a drop in height from the upper floors to the lower floors, it is convenient for waste discharge and centralized sewage treatment; third, the upper floors have good ventilation and lighting, which can effectively prevent the spread of pathogens. At present, the pig farm is still under construction, and the company plans a total investment of 200 million yuan to build a breeding base with 10,000 breeding sows of wild boar stock, producing 200,000 commercial wild boars per year; to build 30,000 sq m of pig housing and 100,000 sq m of wild boar exercise yards; and to build a feed processing plant with an annual output of 50,000 tons, a meat product processing plant with an annual processing capacity of 10,000 tons, and a research office building.”
The reporter found that Zhou Qifeng was not the only one in Pingnan County raising pigs in buildings. Quan Zhaowei, a farmer from Dazhou Town, told the reporter: “I started raising pigs in 2007. As the scale grew larger and larger, the pig housing needed became larger and larger, but in our village it was not easy to rent contiguous land for pig farming, so I thought of the idea of building buildings to raise pigs.” Starting last year, Quan Zhaowei invested more than 600,000 yuan to convert the original pig housing into four stories and build a new four-story pig building, turning the staircases between levels into ramp-style stairs to make it easier for the pigs to go up and down. Quan Zhaowei calculated an account for the reporter: “The two buildings occupy less than 400 sq m, yet more than 3,200 pigs can be sent to market in a year. Although building buildings to raise pigs requires a larger one-time investment, in terms of long-term benefits and management it is very worthwhile.”