China's appetite for pork - Is a 26-storey block really the future of pig farming?

On the southern outskirts of Ezhou, a city in central China's Hubei province, a giant apartment-style building overlooks the main road. But it is not for office workers or families.

At 26 storeys it is by far the biggest single-building pig farm in the world, with a capacity to produce and slaughter 1.2 million animals a year. This is China's answer to its insatiable demand for pork, the most popular animal protein in the country.

The new skyscraper-sized farm began production in October when the company behind it - Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Farming - admitted its first 3,700 sows.

Zhongxin Kaiwei is a newcomer to the pig sector - and farming. It started out as a cement investor, with multiple cement factories in provinces such as Hubei and Henan. One of them, Hubei Xinshiji Cement, is located next to the new pig farm.

The company said that it had originally planned to invest in ready-to-cook food production, but changed its mind after a slump in the cement and construction industries in China. Jin Lin, the company's general manager, said the company considered modern agriculture as a promising sector and an opportunity to use its own construction materials to build the pig farm.

According to statements on the company's official WeChat account, the pig farm has two buildings. Behind the operational site, an identical-looking building of equal scale is nearing completion. When fully running, they will provide a combined 800,000 sq metres of space, with the capacity for 650,000 animals.