A 12-storey pig farm: has China found the way to tackle animal disease?

21 September 2020

Biosecure farms complete with staff quarantine and chutes for dead pigs are seen as progress, but may carry their own risks.

The buildings do not even look like farms. They are huge grey concrete blocks, many storeys high, which stand side by side in the middle of what might look like a quarry, a “hole” of red earth dug in the heart of a mountain.

We are on the Yaji mountain, which in Chinese means “sacred”, a few kilometres south of the city of Guigang in southern China. What we are looking at is the tallest pig farm in the world; units up to nine storeys high housing thousands of pigs, with construction of a 12-storey pig unit under way.

“On each floor we can breed 1,270 pigs,” says Yuanfei Gao, vice-president of Yangxiang, the company that built the farm. “But in the future with the design of the new buildings we plan to have 1,300 pigs per floor.”

Yangxiang is one of the Chinese giants of the pork industry, producing about 2 million pigs a year in a dozen farms throughout China. The Yaji mountain site is its largest and most advanced multistorey farming system, and will have the capacity to produce around 840,000 pigs a year when construction is finished.

Read much more regarding this facility at

The Guardian

Regards Mark

WAV Comment:  We always thought that Trump had lost his marbles way before he was elected as the ‘President’ of the United States; but as money and the making of is his sole intention and concern; here we see that New York; with one of the largest Covid casebooks in the US, is now opening up its wet market doors because of Yom Kippur.

One really has to ask where the priorities of the US lay – trying to beat the Covid virus or simply as the article blow states:

“New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; his Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi; and his Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, allow this mass ritual slaughter to take place, in spite of the health code violations and risks to public health, because NYC’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities represent a powerful voting bloc that can make or break elections in NYC and NY State”.

Now we know; to hell with the deaths and families affected; as per the Trump mentality; votes and money are the thing than mean more than anything else.

If the American public understand and believe this; then vote him in once again and put money before everything else.  We have exposed the links to Covid deaths and the meat industries in many posts; if you ignore the evidence and go with the money; then that is your choice.  We suggest that US citizens really taken this issue on board and start asking some hard, deep down questions about the New York policy – what is most important ? – deaths or votes.

The choice, voters of the USA, is down to you.

Link – New York Times 22/9/20:

At least 5 new coronavirus deaths and 575 new cases were reported in New York on Sept. 21. Over the past week, there have been an average of 790 cases per day, an increase of 5 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

As of Tuesday morning, there have been at least 455,187 cases and 32,691 deaths in New York since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database.

And yet……

Link:   https://theirturn.net/2020/09/19/kaporos-wet-markets-yom-kippur/

Kaporos, Largest Live Animal Wet Market in the United States, Opens Ahead of Yom Kippur

In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, tens of thousands of Hasidim in Brooklyn will purchase and physically handle live chickens in a wet market setting. Wearing little to no PPE, they will swing the chickens around their heads as part of an annual atonement ritual called Kaporos. The chickens will be killed in approximately 30 makeshift slaughterhouses erected without permits on public streets in residential neighborhoods in violation of eight New York City health codes.

The body parts, blood and feces of thousands of animals will contaminate the streets of South Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park for several days.

Kaporos is, in effect, the largest live animal wet market in the country and the only one in which the customers handle the animals before the animals are killed. Many of the animals have compromised immune systems and show signs of respiratory disease.

The chickens make each other sick, and they also infect some of the people who handle them with e. Coli and campylobacter. If the viruses that these animals carry commingle and mutate into a more dangerous strain that could be spread among humans, then these Kaporos wet markets could be the source of the another zoonotic disease outbreak. According to a toxicologist who studied fecal and blood samples taken during Kaporos, the ritual “constitutes a dangerous condition” and “poses a significant public health hazard.”

In addition to putting all of us at risk of another zoonotic disease pandemic, Kaporos, which attracts hordes of people in small areas, could be a COVID “super spreader” event because Hasidic communities have been observed not wearing masks or engaging in social distancing.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; his Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi; and his Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, allow this mass ritual slaughter to take place, in spite of the health code violations and risks to public health, because NYC’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities represent a powerful voting bloc that can make or break elections in NYC and NY State.

In fact, taxpayers help to underwrite the cost because the NYPD provides barricades, floodlights and a large police presence at many of the Kaporos sites. Given the risks and the disruption and death we have already endured already with pandemic, how can the Mayor and his health deputies allow Kaporos to take place?

For the past several years, animal rights and public health advocates have pled with Mayor de Blasio and his revolving door of health commissioners (Dr. Mary Bassett, Dr. Oxiris Barbot and now Dr. Dave Chokshi) to shut down Kaporos, given the health code violations and the risks to the public health.

Both in court and in the media, city attorneys and spokespeople for the NYC Department of Health have defended Kaporos and argued that the City has discretion over which laws to enforce. Throughout the month of September, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos plastered 300 posters around New York City to sound the alarm about Kaporos.

What can you say ? – but

Regards Mark