Last week, while attending the World Pork Conference in China, I visited Muyuan Foods’ multi-storey farm at Jimo. And when I say multi-storey, I mean it literally.
Built in 2020/21 for around £17 million, the 30-metre-high building contains six floors of pigs. The top two floors house around 4,000 sows, with nursery and finishing pigs on the floors below. Around 55,000 pigs are housed there at any one time, with annual output exceeding 110,000 pigs and mortality running at around 4.5%.
But what struck me most wasn’t 55,000 pigs in a six-storey building a stone’s throw from where we were standing. It was how the entire system has been engineered around automation, biosecurity and environmental control.
Automation, From Feeding to Breeding
Robots monitor the pigs — checking temperatures, counting animals, and listening for coughing, with AI helping identify health problems early. Feeding, cleaning, manure handling, ventilation and pig movements are all automated.
Even breeding hasn’t escaped the robots: heat stimulation can involve the artificial sound — and even smell — of a robot boar.
Despite all this automation, the site still employs 103 people. Workers are assigned to specific floors to reduce disease risk — a simple but effective biosecurity measure that’s easy to overlook amid all the technology.
Air, Water and Waste, Engineered End to End
Incoming air passes through four stages of filtration, and exhaust air is treated to remove dust, odour and disease risk. What surprised me most: standing around 20 metres from a building housing 55,000 pigs, there was virtually no smell.
Slurry is separated, solids are composted, and liquids are anaerobically digested. Water is treated and recycled, and liquid fertiliser is applied to around 330 acres of surrounding farmland.
After a career spent around the British pig industry, it was fascinating to see — and I have to admit, I was impressed.
Jimo Isn’t Even Muyuan’s Biggest Site
Jimo isn’t large by Muyuan’s own standards. Their development near Nanyang has 21 multi-storey buildings, 84,000 sows, and produces 2.1 million pigs a year — roughly a fifth of the UK’s entire annual clean-pig output, on one site.
The Familiar Challenges, at a Different Scale
There are obvious questions around welfare, capital cost, resilience and concentration risk. But the underlying challenges are the same ones we grapple with across the industry everywhere, including here in Southeast Asia: land, labour, biosecurity, disease, emissions, odour, energy, and productivity.
Interestingly, Muyuan themselves acknowledged that the technology is still at a relatively early stage, with some processes “not yet fully refined” and reliability still “requiring improvement.” Read into that what you will.
The Economics Behind the Model
But the prize on offer is significant. Muyuan believes that over the next five to ten years, AI, automation and data analysis could help deliver margins of around US$38 per pig. At Jimo’s current output, that’s potentially more than US$4 million a year from one site. You begin to understand why they’re putting so much effort into the model.
What This Means for Producers Across Vietnam, Thailand and China
Few operations in the region will build a six-storey, 55,000-pig facility — nor should most try to. But the underlying principles scale down: disciplined biosecurity zoning, early health detection, tight environmental control, and waste treatment that turns a cost into an asset (recycled water, liquid fertiliser, composted solids) are relevant at almost any scale of operation.
If you’re weighing where automation and better environmental engineering could move the needle on your own site, I’d be glad to talk it through. Get in touch at leechafer@agriswineasia.pro.
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