China’s Bid to Improve Pig Production? Giant Towers of Pigs

If you feel some discomfort around this, and I do, It's interesting to stop and try to rationalise why: No aspect of modern intensive farming is different from this except in scale.

Lower-scale 'free roaming' farming may have a higher quality of life for the animal, but the end outcome is more expensive protein for humans and less protein per square meter.

Factory farming demands factories. This is mega-factory scale. It's also somehow very depressing.

Shades of the talking Jewish voiced cow in a Lisa Simpson vegetarian episode..

(I am a meat eater. I draw the line at whale meat and dolphins, but now we're there, pigs are very intelligent and in some ways even closer to human: thats why we use them as xeno transplant building blocks in the current research)

Animal raising has all kinds of issues. Heat, waste. This factory model optimises over many of those, makes good use of surplus energy and waste. These upsides are good. China has a huge population and an insatiable drive for protein.

These kinds of factory make me worry about disease, at scale, and breeding xeno-mobile diseases. China has form here. (not a covid reference: bird flu and chinese chicken production, swine fever and chinese pork production. It happens in other economies too.)

One wonders what they do with the sewage. That must be water pollution disaster (even with the 1/3rd of it that becomes methane)