World’s Largest Pig Farm To Open, Will ‘Produce’ 2 Million Pigs Per Year
The launch of the huge industrial multi-storey pig farm comes amid a worldwide pandemic and despite the global spread of swine flu killing hundreds of millions of pigs in recent years.
Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
The world’s largest pig farm has started operating and aims to breed and slaughter around 2.1 million pigs a year.
Muyuan Foods has built the huge industrial mega farm in Neixiang county, Henan province, China.
The farm consists of 21 multi-storey concrete buildings and is seen as a mark of change in the farming industry, where many small, traditional farms were wiped out by the recent spread of swine flu. The disease is estimated to have killed a quarter of the world’s pig population, including as many as 100 million pigs in China last year alone.
And a new strain of flu found in pigs in China has recently worried scientists who fear that the virus bears “all the hallmarks” of being able to mutate and pass onto humans.
Those fears - along with the ongoing devastation of the current worldwide pandemic caused by the zoonotic disease COVID-19 - have not stopped Muyuan Foods’ in its mission to launch the world’s biggest pig farm. In fact, the rapid construction on the farm only began in March this year, with operations then starting by September.
Muyuan will spend about 40 billion yuan this year - roughly $6.1billion - on new pig farms, which is about eight times what it spent two years ago, reports Reuters.
More stories:
Species Unite
A collection of stories of those who fight the good fight on behalf of animals.
How to protect rhinos from poachers, learning about what owls know, and the campaign to stop the construction of the biggest ‘monkey farm’ in the US - these are just some of the topics covered in our most listened-to episodes of the year.