Chinese people do not like to eat foreign meat - in terms of diet, if a food is labeled as "imported", it often means "expensive" and is highly sought after. But pork is different. If consumers know that a pork product uses "imported frozen pork", then they would rather buy some fresh meat. However, it is not simple to fully guarantee the "pork freedom" of 1.4 billion people. Before, China imported millions of tons of pork every year. . In the context of our "land tight, consumption is constantly upgrading, and the accelerated development of high-tech industries", the emergence of "pig farming in high-rise buildings" is not accidental, but inevitable.
China reduces pork imports
China is the world's largest pork producer and consumer, so even on the basis of the annual output of 670 million pigs, we still imported 3.71 million tons of pork. Fortunately, with the development of my country's pig industry and the market squeeze on "imported pork", the total amount of imported pork in my country is gradually decreasing.
Not long ago, the US Department of Agriculture predicted that China's total pork imports will drop by about 20% in 2022, and is expected to decline further in 2023!
In fact, the decreasing amount of pork imports not only exists, but is also irreversible! (As long as there is no major epidemic outbreak) In order to strengthen food security, our country is rapidly improving the level of self-sufficiency of pork.
Take Guangdong, a province with a large pork consumption as an example. The Guangdong Provincial Government proposed as early as 2019 that by 2025, the province's pig output will remain above 33 million and the self-sufficiency rate will remain above 70%; and promote the transformation of small and free-range breeding to standardized large-scale breeding, and build 30 pig farms (bases) with more than 100,000 pig farms (bases) and more than 3 million pig farms (bases).
However, friends in the breeding industry know that it has become increasingly difficult to apply for a new breeding farm in recent years, and environmental protection is the first pass that is difficult to pass. It is not feasible whether it is close to water sources or to villages, let alone occupying arable land and forest land, it is all red lines! Although the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has reduced 14,100 prohibited breeding areas, there are still as high as 86,000 prohibited breeding areas, with an area of 1.212 million square kilometers.
It can be seen that the breeding industry has passed the era of "growing the number of people employed" and has entered the era of "improving the level of intensiveness".
Therefore, it is not accidental, but inevitable that "tall building pig farming" will appear and be popular in China!
The inevitability of "pig farming in high-rise buildings"
The first contradiction pointed to by "pig farming in buildings" is "land tight": From the perspective of food security, China must strictly adhere to the red line of 1.8 billion mu of arable land; from the perspective of happiness index, the per capita residential area must be continuously improved; from the perspective of national development, the "world factory" and the high-tech industry develop simultaneously, and more land is needed...
Therefore, when the breeding land policy was relaxed in 2019 and 2020, many large pig companies "snatch land"! Hurry up and build a project and compete for territory. Even a domestic leading pig farming company, its subsidiary has been exposed to occupying hundreds of acres of basic farmland in violation of regulations! This essentially highlights the current situation of tight land use in China's livestock industry.
Therefore, for the animal husbandry industry, Strengthening land resource utilization is the key to development, and "built pig farming" has come into being.
The first large-scale building pig farm in China is Guangxi Yangxiang Co., Ltd. . As early as 2017, Yangxiang built the first high-rise pig farm in China. Two buildings on the 9th and 11th floors, which can accommodate 30,000 sows. One building covers an area of only more than ten acres. Reuters called it a "pig-raising hotel" after visiting, and it was the "highest pig farm in the world" at that time.
Yangxiang Chairman Mo Jinzhi pointed out that if the pig farm adopts a flat-layer structure, a pig farm with a scale of 10,000 heads generally covers an area of about 200 acres. If you want to build a large pig farm that can accommodate 30,000 pigs, you need nearly 1,000 acres of land! In other words, this "building pig farm" in Yangxiang 5 years ago saved nearly 190% of the land.
breeding pigs of the same size only requires 1/10 of the land used in flat pig farms!
What is more noteworthy is that the function of "pig raising in buildings" is often not just "pig raising". Taking pig raising in smart buildings as the starting point, Yangxiang has created a full-industry chain model integrating "material, raising, slaughtering and commerce". What Gao Yuanfei, vice president of Yangxiang and president of the pig farming business department, said is a "meat-making factory".
Gao Yuanfei pointed out: Developing a building pig farm is an inevitable choice for Yangxiang, but what we consider is not just building a building to raise pigs, we designed material raising and slaughtering and merchant integrated . In other words, the ones transported into the pig farm are corn and soybean meal, and the ones transported out are divided meat and even meat products. This is the development direction of pig farming in Yangxiang Buildings.
The revised " Pig Slaughter Management Regulations " announced by the State Council in 2021 also proposed "the state encourages the integrated development of pig breeding, slaughtering, processing, distribution and sales."
It can be seen that "pig farming in buildings" is not a simple superposition of pig farm floors, but promotes the transformation of traditional "animal raising" into "food making", thereby achieving the value improvement and cost reduction of the entire industry; it solves not only the land problem, but also the problem of industrial chain intensiveness and the direction of industrial development.
Therefore, in the past five years, "pig raising in buildings" has gradually developed into "pig raising in buildings". Not only does the pig house be built higher and higher, but the technological content is also getting higher and higher.
However, in the face of China's unique pig farming model, foreign experts and domestic voices say that it has many disadvantages, such as "high cost, difficulty in preventing diseases, difficulty in environmental protection, and animal welfare". These problems do exist objectively, but under the guidance of the inevitability of "raising pigs in high-rise buildings", the problem with is not a problem. The key lies in "using problems to promote development and solving problems with development."
"High-rise Pig Raising" problem
cost problem
"High-rise Pig Raising" first problem is cost. Pig Raising is the heavy asset industry. Even Wang Jianlin has to back off after hearing this, and if he builds high-rise pigs, the initial investment in pig farming will increase by 30%. For example, the largest single-area pig farm in the country has a height of 26 floors, with an investment of 4 billion yuan!
But industry insiders believe that if the depreciation time of "building pig farming" is calculated based on 40-50 years, the overall cost will not be high! I think that companies that choose to raise pigs in building are all financially powerful companies, and the high cost of raising pigs in floor will force breeding companies to improve their efficiency!
From another perspective, "built pig farming" has rapidly improved the modernization and intelligence of breeding, greatly reducing labor and saving time. is like a building pig farm with a stock of 50,000 heads, but there are only more than 40 staff members. On average, each staff member can manage more than 1,000 pigs in a refined manner! is placed in the traditional breeding model and you can’t even think about it!
In addition, if the "building pig farm" eventually develops into what Gao Yuanfei calls "meat making factory" that integrates aggregates, raising, slaughtering and merchants, then the cost accounting of the entire industrial chain will be greatly reduced.
Even if a pig company loses in the end, his money will be used to explore industry development, rather than investing in the stock market in vain. And this is a competitive market where the fittest survives, and those who fail will surely succeed! Only by actively investing in competition can you continue to grow.
Epidemic problem
In addition, there is a big problem saying that internal epidemics in pig farming in buildings are "easy to spread but hard to prevent".I think this will only force pig farms to be more perfect in biosecurity . Just like if there was no non-plague, China would not pay attention to biosecurity in another 10 years. Once the non-plague comes, pig farms across the country have strengthened their safety awareness and greatly reduced epidemic infection!
Take the pig farm actually operated by Yangxiang as an example. In terms of temperature control, the exterior wall of the building pig farm is an insulation layer. The pig farm adopts an intelligent temperature control system inside the pig farm, and the ventilation duct uses a thermal insulation mortar process, which can greatly reduce the probability of large-scale infection in pigs at high temperatures. The design of differentiated functional units independent of each other and isolated from each building can slow the spread of epidemics; there is also a small unit design that is overhead on the ground floor and is not related to each layer, which maximizes the transmission of pathogens and cross-infection channels; plus the locked breeding mode and intelligent temperature control mode...it can fully ensure the biosafety and environmental appropriateness of each floor.
anti-non-prevention is mainly a problem of technology and responsibility, not a problem of pattern.
Other problems
For environmental protection, this is only reflected in the "technical problems" of pig farming in buildings, and it can be seen that as long as each "pig farm in buildings" can be built and put into production, they will basically solve the environmental problems. Just as Gao Yuanfei said: There will definitely be difficulties in the development process of everything, and solve difficulties when encountering difficulties. Yangxiang's philosophy has always been to change the pig farming industry in science and technology. When encountering difficulties, go to technical experts.
As for "animal welfare", we cannot only see the increase in the overall density of the pig herd, which is a "false proposition"; we must see that pigs also enjoy "technology welfare". Just as the Yangxiang Building Pig Farm has launched the FPF future pig farm management platform and smart devices. brings the "people, pigs, things, farms, and enterprises" of traditional pig farms to the Internet, which can realize accurate collection, automatic analysis, overall analysis, and intelligent empowerment of production data, and ultimately realize intelligent management of the production process, effectively liberating people's hands and brains. Pig has better ventilation systems, temperature control systems, feeding systems, detergent systems, etc. , and even the health status of each pig is paid attention to by the system 24 hours a day... It truly realizes "easy raising pigs and a happy life".
A farm manager of a "built pig farming" project in Yangxiang once revealed that the feeling brought to him by raising pigs in the building was shocking. I didn't expect that so many pigs would not smell at all when they were raised! In addition, in order to cool down pigs in summer, traditional pig farms must rely more on artificial watering, which makes the fan roar all day long to dissipate heat. Pigs also stick their tongues to dissipate heat and breathe, and open their mouths to breathe more air, which is very frustrating. However, the pigs raised in the "building" have a central air conditioning to cool down in summer, and their breathing is extremely calm. When wakes up, the pigs are more energetic; when they fall asleep, they sleep very soundly!
The inevitable development of
The emergence of a new model will inevitably bring a lot of controversy. There is a saying that goes - If everyone can agree with you, then how mediocre should you be?
Therefore, debate is useless, only practice can produce true knowledge.
Since 2017 to the present, at least 14 provinces across the country have appeared in "building pig farming" projects, generally reaching more than 6 floors, and "high-rise pig farming" has also been labeled as "unique to China". If pig farming in a building really does harm more than good, and if it is really difficult to implement, then 5 years is enough to eliminate this model! instead of nowadays, the pig houses are getting higher and higher, the popularity is getting wider and the investment is getting bigger and bigger.
As early as December 2019, the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs jointly issued the "Notice on Issues Related to the Management of Facilities Agricultural Land", which clearly stated that "multi-story buildings are allowed for the construction of breeding facilities." The 2022 Central Document No. 1 also clearly states: accelerate the development of facility agriculture and encourage the development of new breeding facilities such as factory-based intensive breeding and three-dimensional ecological breeding.
Both countries and industries have recognized the development model of "building pig farming" through practice summary time considerations, which can best explain the problem.
Gao Yuanfei pointed out incisively: Pig farming in buildings is one direction, and technology should not reverse this direction, because the general trend of national development is the development of agriculture towards industrialization. The emergence of the building pig farm itself has turned pig farming into an industrial development, and it will not only drive the development of the pig farming industry.
In short, pig farming is backed by people's livelihood, is subject to land, and is dependent on technology. All problems are just problems of development. As long as the inevitable direction of development is correct, technology and pig farming will surely achieve each other. "High-rise pig farming" is just one of the carriers for the two to achieve each other.
Finally, Gao Yuanfei's humorous words are used as the end of this article:
"The carriage is much cheaper than a car, but why do most people don't choose a carriage? Those who drive carriages have never figured out that the wooden frame is very cheap, and the horse does not need to add gasoline, and it is cheaper to eat grass. Why do everyone drive expensive cars? You can take a look at what people are doing in building pig farming? After the trading, you will find that most of them are from the top 30 pig farming companies in China. Did these people become the top 30 out of thin air? Even if there is a problem with pig farming in building, the R&D capabilities and continuous improvement capabilities of these top 30 companies can make pig farming in building a reality! Of course, let them worry about different voices from the outside world."
