China builds 26-storey 'pig skyscraper', experts warn of disease outbreak risks

China: The ‘pig skyscraper’ has been made to meet China's demand for pork, the most popular animal protein in the country, Guardian reported.

A 26-storey apartment-style building- by far the biggest pig farm in the world, with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs a year has been built on the southern outskirts of Ezhou, a city in central China’s Hubei province, a report said.

China: The new skyscraper-sized farm began production at the start of October.

The ‘pig skyscraper’ has been made to meet China's demand for pork, the most popular animal protein in the country, Guardian reported. The new skyscraper-sized farm began production at the start of October when the company behind the facility – Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Farming – admitted its first 3,700 sows into the farm.

The company has said that it originally planned to invest in ready-to-cook food production, but that it changed its mind. Jin Lin, the general manager of the company, has said that the company saw modern agriculture as a promising sector and an opportunity to use its own construction materials to build the pig farm.

The pig farm has two buildings and behind the operational site, an identical-looking building of equal scale is nearing completion. When fully running, they will provide a combined area of 800,000 square metres of space, with the capacity for 650,000 animals.

The 4 billion yuan (£473m) farm has gas, temperature and ventilation-controlled conditions, with animals fed through more than 30,000 automatic feeding spots.

However, experts said large-scale intensive farms increased the likelihood of ever-bigger disease outbreaks.

“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,” Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University told the Guardian.