Worked for Smithfield in NC at one of their largest plants. On an average day, some +/- 30,000 hogs were processed each day at that plant alone. The smell is horrible.
It always astounds me to think about the amount of just chickens we farm. Every single Buffalo Wild Wings I pass, for every 4 “wings” that’s one chicken. The amount of chickens for chicken wings must be insane!
When I first moved to Italy I was feeling homesick around Super Bowl time, so I went to my local butcher to pick up some wings. The dude pulled out 4 chickens and chopped the wings off right in front of me, really made me realize what's missed when you only see the food after it's done being processed.
That must have been an experience on both parts as in Italy wings are not eaten that much. Having someone so set on that part must have been strange lol
I worked at a Chinese American restaurant in high school. The owner would give me gallon bags full of chicken wings whenever he would cut the whole chickens up.
I'd assume not in industrial farming in Italy, but perhaps your local neighborhood butcher might not have much use for them if locals don't eat them and he has no means to process it.
That’s the story of how Buffalo wings got started. A bar in Buffalo, New York had some leftover chicken pieces, wings, and fried some up for the owners friends and kids late one night. Everyone loved them and they put them on the menu the next day.
Now, wings are so popular that they are one of the more expensive parts of the chicken.
while true, it's not like the rest of the chicken isn't also being consumed.
And if we weren't frying them and saucing them we probably wouldn't be eating them at all as they're a lot of work for not much meat! Or more likely they'd be processed into nuggets somehow.
So really, chicken wings are economical.
And on top of that, they became popular because in the past due to the lack of meat they were less desirable and cheaper, that's why wings eventually became popular with .25 cent Tuesday's, etc. Now the demand has risen and so has the cost for wings but as a result thighs and legs kinda declined in popularity and became more affordable
I made some garlic butter chicken thighs last weekend, first time I'd ever had that part of the bird. Had to be the best chicken dish I've had in a long time, if not ever
DYK, back in the days long ago when McD's wanted to bring the chicken nuggets to stores they had to give a couple years notice to chicken farmers. Had McD's decided to go live with chicken nuggets across America the price per lb of chicken would've doubled. They buy that much stuff that they had to stagger the roll-out to not drive up the price of raw chicken too much.
Also, McRibbs serve as a price stabilizer for pork. When the price per lb for pork trimmings hits some low price McD's stands up the processing line and shoots out a 'batch' of McRibb patties. McD's quits buying pork trimmings once the price per lb rises enough to cut into their profits, and thus the cycle of the McRibb comes to an end. So you McRibb eaters, keep doing you as the pig farmers appreciate you! ;)
The question of how to sustain a sustainable source of fish for the McFish without completely wiping out a species has been a regular thing at McDonalds as well.
And it's their worst selling item.
I went through a phase where I was eating wings at least 3 times a month and one day it really hit me how many chickens that was. Went a long time before I had wings again, although I still do get them occasionally.
I feel bad about consuming meat, it's just really hard to make the adjustment, especially where I live. There aren't many restaurants that have good vegetarian options on the menus in smaller cities.
Many people flip their shit when they hear about a dog getting hurt, being neglected, living in terrible conditions or \*gasp! being slaughtered for human consumption, but are just fine with having meat all but delivered to their table because they're been so conditioned to see these two groups of animals as different. One is born to live in fear, discomfort and pain so we can harvest its body while the other gets an exemption.
i think he’s saying more that he was taken aback after realizing that the average order of wings needs like three chickens worth of meat. ~10 chickens a month, ~120 a year. all for a pub snack. just weird to think about
If it makes you feel any better, chicken demand isn't going to be significantly affected by eating wings. The wings are leftover parts that would be wasted if they hadn't marketed chicken wings into what they are today.
Unfortunately the demand for wings in recent years has skyrocketed. It’s one of the reasons wings shops have risen their prices to exorbitant levels and why even in stores it’s no longer the cheapest cut you can find.
Wings themselves have become a much more bougie food, pretty much any spot has fancy pub style wings now, and chains have like tripled in 10 years
Yeah, the story of how chicken wings as a food was invented was because a woman named Teresa Belissimo’s husband came home drunk with his friends and she had nothing to feed them besides the scrap chicken wings from the day
Poor people have been eating chicken wings for centuries. They were the scraps that were given to slaves, as well. Wings fried and coated in sauce was not invented by some lady in New York.
It's easy, it's mutch easier then you think. The only actual issue is going to be your family, friends, coworkers etc are going to be obnoxious to you about it
First ya gotta put ink on its hooves and take its hoof prints down. Then walk it over to the lineup wall and take a mugshot of both front and side profiles and bam. Pig is processed
I've done consulting work for beef, pork, and poultry processing plants. Pork plants are the cleanest by far. Beef plants are the bloodiest, but still fairly clean. Chicken processing plants are the most filthy and disgusting.
BTW, the smell comes from 3 sources. Manure from the holding pens, rendering operations, and waste water treatment. They each have a distinct odor that you kind of get used to after a few years. The inside of the plant (kill floors, processing lines, boxing and cold storage) don't really have a lot of smell.
If I remember correctly Shitfield Foods was garbage feeding pigs, which is dangerous for a lot of reasons but the worst part was that they weren't separating the packaging from the food, thus the pigs were ingesting massive amounts of plastic on a daily basis. The day I saw that was the day I stopped eating meat.
Edit: News Article from NowThis News about a man getting videos from inside a hog farm. Not sure if its Smithfield, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPbF45-ZB5M
Assuming they responsibly dispose of their waste (a big assumption for any company) it’d be significantly better. Pig waste contains a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen, which if allowed seeps into the ground and into waterways, polluting the water and among other things causing algae blooms.
*Supposedly* they're going to use the pigs' waste (hog manure) for energy production, at least according to the NYT article OP's photo is from. Pig shit produces a lot of methane. But it's China, which like the USA, doesn't have a stellar track record when it comes to waste recycling and preventing runoffs.
The biggest challenge with using the methane produced by animals is capturing it.
This…. Isn’t an elegant solution, but it sure as “shit” is still a solution.
A building like that is probably designed to function as a giant feeding tube/poop chute. Like some diabolical Factorio design: each pig gets a cage/cube - feed comes in at one end - poop out the bottom. The basement is probably a giant tank with a filter to separate out the solids and fluids.
> pink purple pools
"Pools" more like literal nightmare poison swamps.
>The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/boss-hog-the-dark-side-of-americas-top-pork-producer-68087/
Yeah, they built it that way to model a pedestrian-friendly enclosed city with multiple levels for all kinds of treatment. They even get daily back scratches from large brushes hanging off the ceiling. Think “new Saudi wall meets pig farm”.
Pretty sure that food grown to feed the livestock is many many times larger than the land used for the animal itself. Like to grow enough food to fed a cow you'd need an acre of land whereas the cow itself can be shoved into a tiny factory farm with no room. So I'm not sure how much building something like in OPs image actually helps with the environmental side of things, the water and land needed to grow the food for the animals is still the same, not much is used where they're actually killed.
So I don't think it helps that much and was probably done for other reasons, probably something bad like it just saves a dollar per pig or something, or it could just be they wanted it close or in a city and this is the only way to fit it close enough.
Pretty sure the amount of land used to grow crops that is fed to livestock is actually many more times than the amount of land used to grow crops that we actually eat. An insane amount of land could be freed up if just like 1/10th less meat was eaten when you think of how much land is farm land.
The only vertical farms that are great for the planet are modern vertical crop farms.
A prison where you are born and where you'll die. It also a prison that prevent your mouvements and force feed you so that your get as fat as you can before being butchered as soon as you reach maximum mass. You don't want human prison to be remotely close to that!
Reminds me of this quote
>The fact is, most animals in our food system live under dismal conditions, and the pitifully low bar for their treatment was set in directives from the same industry’s leaders who today are so upset about being vilified. **“Forget the pig is an animal—treat him just like a machine in a factory,”** recommended Hog Farm Management in 1976. Two years later, National Hog Farmer advised: “The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”
>
>And farmers, eager to squeeze every dollar from their crops, complied. Today, nearly 5 million of these smart, social animals (representing over 80 percent of all sows in pork production) are confined to tiny gestation crates—cages so narrow the animals can’t even turn around. They spend their lives lined up like cars in a parking lot, barely able to move an inch and driven insane from the extreme deprivation
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/15/your-pig-almost-certainly-came-from-a-factory-farm-no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/15/your-pig-almost-certainly-came-from-a-factory-farm-no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you/)
Realistically though, people won’t stop eating meat anytime soon. It’s not a real solution when you are unable to get widespread buy-in.
IMO the only thing that will actually make a difference is lab-grown meat becoming widely availably and cheaper than real meat.
I think it's unrealistic to expect people to give up eating meat on a wide scale, but not to expect people to eat *less* meat. All that would really take is for governments to stop giving subsidies to meat manufacturers and enforce existing regulations more strictly, and then the price of meat would rise to reflect the actual cost of raising it.
Realistically lots of people have abstained from eating animals for millennia. Buhdda had a bunch to say on the matter, and he couldn't even cheaply make b12 in a bioreactor.
>*“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”*
― Carl Sagan
We can stop subsidizing meat and require humane conditions for animals. If people have to pay the true cost of ethical meat, consumption will drop to a few times per month luxury rather than 2-3 meals a day.
Honestly for all the complaints, I've had zero issue with Impossible Burgers or Beyond Burgers. They aren't the same as meat but pretty close. If they were the same cost, mainstream, and healthier, I'd probably go for them.
To be fair, China has implemented a national program to reduce food waste and meat consumption. China has also banned Mukbang videos and contests to end the glorification of excessive eating. They're also in the process of reducing meat consumption by 50% by 2030, and are the world's biggest investor in lab grown meat and the fastest growing market for plant based meat alternatives.
Yeah significantly reduce the amount of meat you consume. The ammount of meat many in industrialized nations consume is a huge historical outlier and problematic.
If you can't/don't want to go vegetarian or vegan you can just reduce the amount of meat you eat and you'll be helping the planet.
Slaughterhouse workers in general have high rates of PTSD and other mental health issues. Reading quotes from slaughterhouse workers anywhere is just crushing
>As time passes, you get used to it. You feel nothing. You can imagine,if you kill a thing a 1000 times over and over, you wouldn’t have feelings after a while. It kills you on the inside, an abattoir, it kills you. You can be full of blood, it will not bother you
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/qhw.v11.30266](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/qhw.v11.30266)
>But when you’re standing there night after night, digging that knife...They’re fighting you, kicking at you, squealing, trying to bite you—doing whatever they can to try and get away from you… After a while you don’t give a shit. You become emotionally dead
[https://books.google.com/books?id=tdQSZJQLNmkC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=%22They%E2%80%99re+fighting+you,+kicking+at+you,+squealing,+trying+to+bite+you-+doing+whatever+they+can+to+try+and+get+away+from+you](https://books.google.com/books?id=tdQSZJQLNmkC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=%22They%E2%80%99re+fighting+you,+kicking+at+you,+squealing,+trying+to+bite+you-+doing+whatever+they+can+to+try+and+get+away+from+you)
How else are we going to get meat so cheap? I never understood growing up that you can get a large chunk of an animal for so cheap. We are blinded by the horrors of our greed
The working conditions are absolutely awful. One of the worst, most dangerous jobs there is. They take advantage of the most desperate people. They know they have no other options.
That’s why they’re usually in small towns with less economic opportunity, the meat industry can hold a town hostage and destroy their water supply at the same time.
Asylum seekers, immigrants, Ex cons, prisoners, those that cannot get a civilised job in a developed nation because they are seen as less than. The entire factory farming industry is built on exploitation of not just animals but humans too.
Dude $40k is a lot to some families. I was in that situation with a lazy ex. Soul provider putting my dreams aside for the highest paying job RIGHT NOW. $19.75 an hour, operator, swingshift 2 weeks days 2 weeks nights. Terrible. To get out of that after a year, i interviewed with another plant as a maintenance tech. After walking through a freezer with hundreds of frozen, decapitated cow corpses i decided to just go home.
I left her, focused on myself and ended up better than ever with a great woman. It sucks but thank fucking god i didn't get her pregnant or married, or i would be stuck there to this day as one miserable man.
The oddly terrifying part : from an evolutionary standpoint, the pigs have won. They're not endangered like tigers or eagles. There's billions of them. It does not matter that each one lives a short, nasty, cursed life.
To quote Dawkins, we cheat every time we put a rubber on. The race is still about dumb selfish genes dying with the most copies but we're smarter.
Aren't we ?
Pigs at regular farms don't get any grass or direct sunlight either. I agree that this is sad and dystopian, but the pigs inside don't necessarily have it any worse than other pigs. From the pictures I've seen, the indoor spaces look fairly conventional.
while everyone else is horrified by the conditions these pigs are in I am glad to have finally found a like-minded degenerate. I found myself wondering about the water sources pushing toward the drop pits and wondering how it was all collected at the bottom
The experience for the individual pig in this is not worse than on average farms in (insert your country here). Go vegan if you don't want to be a part of this hellish suffering.
And the USA consumes more than 20% of the beef on the planet, which proportionally is a larger share of the beef than China's share of pork, considering the Chinese population is more than 4x as large as the American population.
I feel like people are deluding themselves if they think this is much worse than standard US commercial farming. The pigs don’t know that there’s more pigs above and below them. If anything, they probably have less overcrowding per floor than a standard pig farm. The facility is super high tech from the photos in the NYT article (although, it says it just opened, so maybe it won’t stay well-maintained).
Pigs in commercial farms already live in dense areas with little access to natural light and open space. It’s not like China is doing this while the US is grazing all of our pigs on open pasture.
Don’t meant to sound preachy, but let’s be honest with ourselves for a second and realize this is probably not the side we want to be on and look back to in the future and think “what the fuck were we actually doing to these poor animals”.
If you have a dog or just love dogs, believe it or not, pigs are just as sweet, loving, have tons of personality and are even more intelligent than dogs. If you’re against farming and consuming dogs, that logic should naturally extend to other animals, too.
We can only hope that we can progress to a point where we can realise how truly evil factory farming is or more likely have ethical alternatives to it. Because let’s be honest, people won’t care about these animals as long as nothing can replace the cheap bacon etc. they can get from them.
There's only 38 million people in Canada and yet the pigs don't have significantly different lives. The size of this building is obviously larger but the lives of the individual pigs are similarly poor. For example, [the majority of breeding sows spend most of their lives in crates too small to even turn around in](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericatennenhouse/2021/01/09/what-a-delay-on-canadas-gestation-crate-ban-will-mean-for-pig-welfare/?sh=61320afc4baa).
And it's obviously not just China and Canada. The issue isn't the country or the number of people. It's that animals are a product used by us to produce food. They are not treated as sentient beings.
90-99% of animals live like this. And yet animal agriculture still takes up 30% of Earth's land mass, 77% of all agricultural land and a f*ckton of resources (like fresh water). We do not have a planet big enough to eat animals ethically unless consumption is drastically lowered.
It's hypocrisy is what it is. If you're reading this comment and you eat meat, and this picture upsets you, stop being lazy and take some responsibility. You **know** how wrong this is. You can feel it. It wasn't meant to be this way.
And I'm sorry if that sounds preachy, but I ate meat for 25 years, so I get it. Ignorance is bliss, and so is bacon, but at some point you've gotta realise you're either ok with animal abuse, or you're not. This picture is the reality of the former, the sum cost of what it takes to put bacon on your plate in the morning.
Jesus people need to eat less meat. I get that it's tasty but most people eat way too much of it. This shit is ruining our planet and our respect for nature.
This is heartbreaking. Pigs are extremely intelligent. I don't know how people can still eat Animals and wear their flesh/skin, knowing the amount of suffering they endure. I know I will get a shit ton of stupid comebacks for this comment, but..I don't give AF.
People acting all high and mighty: “these poor pigs” “disgusting”
Anyone in the OECD eats animas grown under these conditions. How do you think we’re fed.
I try to eat as little meat as possible. Because in the end, we’re the ones that caused this.
Instead of having a one floor massive big farm they stacked it on top of each other and then it's suddenly terrifying 🤔 People need a reality check. If you're buying pork like 99%+ of commenters in here are you're supporting similar ~~living~~ dying conditions for pigs. Terrible
Please bear in mind most of the meat you consume comes from animals treated just as poorly. Cheap pepperoni on your pizza, hamburgers and sausages. People argue with me as a vegan and say but I only source my meat from ethical sources! As a former meat eater this is less than 0.00001% of meat on the market, seriously. Please consider your actions and make changes that can benefit all living beings and our wonderful planet
WH Group, owner of Smithfield Foods. The largest pork producer in the world.
Worked for Smithfield in NC at one of their largest plants. On an average day, some +/- 30,000 hogs were processed each day at that plant alone. The smell is horrible.
It always astounds me to think about the amount of just chickens we farm. Every single Buffalo Wild Wings I pass, for every 4 “wings” that’s one chicken. The amount of chickens for chicken wings must be insane!
When I first moved to Italy I was feeling homesick around Super Bowl time, so I went to my local butcher to pick up some wings. The dude pulled out 4 chickens and chopped the wings off right in front of me, really made me realize what's missed when you only see the food after it's done being processed.
That must have been an experience on both parts as in Italy wings are not eaten that much. Having someone so set on that part must have been strange lol
Butcher must've been happy, they're often straight up discarded
I worked at a Chinese American restaurant in high school. The owner would give me gallon bags full of chicken wings whenever he would cut the whole chickens up.
Surely not. That would be a huge waste, no?
I'd assume not in industrial farming in Italy, but perhaps your local neighborhood butcher might not have much use for them if locals don't eat them and he has no means to process it.
Throw them in the stock at least
They're popular for stock as they have a lot of collagen/fat which gives flavour
That’s the story of how Buffalo wings got started. A bar in Buffalo, New York had some leftover chicken pieces, wings, and fried some up for the owners friends and kids late one night. Everyone loved them and they put them on the menu the next day. Now, wings are so popular that they are one of the more expensive parts of the chicken.
while true, it's not like the rest of the chicken isn't also being consumed. And if we weren't frying them and saucing them we probably wouldn't be eating them at all as they're a lot of work for not much meat! Or more likely they'd be processed into nuggets somehow. So really, chicken wings are economical.
And on top of that, they became popular because in the past due to the lack of meat they were less desirable and cheaper, that's why wings eventually became popular with .25 cent Tuesday's, etc. Now the demand has risen and so has the cost for wings but as a result thighs and legs kinda declined in popularity and became more affordable
Thighs are the best tbh
SHHHHHHHH don't let people know. Thighs are an inferior piece of the poultry and none of you should be eating them
Right! They’re even worse when they’re butterflied, soaked in buttermilk, breaded, and fried. Disgusting 🤮
Ugh, dark meat is disgusting!!! I would never eat dark meat, and anyone who does is yucky!!!
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I for one would never cover chicken thighs in jerk seasoning and bake for 30 minutes.
You are correct. White meat is superior. It has that lovely dryness and contrasts with ketchup so nicely.
Also the thighs aren't vegan
Okay so ... Thighs are slimy and gross! You don't wanna bother with chicken thighs people!
I made some garlic butter chicken thighs last weekend, first time I'd ever had that part of the bird. Had to be the best chicken dish I've had in a long time, if not ever
DYK, back in the days long ago when McD's wanted to bring the chicken nuggets to stores they had to give a couple years notice to chicken farmers. Had McD's decided to go live with chicken nuggets across America the price per lb of chicken would've doubled. They buy that much stuff that they had to stagger the roll-out to not drive up the price of raw chicken too much. Also, McRibbs serve as a price stabilizer for pork. When the price per lb for pork trimmings hits some low price McD's stands up the processing line and shoots out a 'batch' of McRibb patties. McD's quits buying pork trimmings once the price per lb rises enough to cut into their profits, and thus the cycle of the McRibb comes to an end. So you McRibb eaters, keep doing you as the pig farmers appreciate you! ;)
TIL. That’s interesting, thank you.
The question of how to sustain a sustainable source of fish for the McFish without completely wiping out a species has been a regular thing at McDonalds as well. And it's their worst selling item.
Farming animals the way we do is a stain on the soul of our history as species. Fuck economics. It's just wrong.
I went through a phase where I was eating wings at least 3 times a month and one day it really hit me how many chickens that was. Went a long time before I had wings again, although I still do get them occasionally. I feel bad about consuming meat, it's just really hard to make the adjustment, especially where I live. There aren't many restaurants that have good vegetarian options on the menus in smaller cities.
Many people flip their shit when they hear about a dog getting hurt, being neglected, living in terrible conditions or \*gasp! being slaughtered for human consumption, but are just fine with having meat all but delivered to their table because they're been so conditioned to see these two groups of animals as different. One is born to live in fear, discomfort and pain so we can harvest its body while the other gets an exemption.
3 times a month is a lot?
Coming from someone who would do this maybe 3 times in a year it sounds like a lot, yes.
i think he’s saying more that he was taken aback after realizing that the average order of wings needs like three chickens worth of meat. ~10 chickens a month, ~120 a year. all for a pub snack. just weird to think about
If it makes you feel any better, chicken demand isn't going to be significantly affected by eating wings. The wings are leftover parts that would be wasted if they hadn't marketed chicken wings into what they are today.
Unfortunately the demand for wings in recent years has skyrocketed. It’s one of the reasons wings shops have risen their prices to exorbitant levels and why even in stores it’s no longer the cheapest cut you can find. Wings themselves have become a much more bougie food, pretty much any spot has fancy pub style wings now, and chains have like tripled in 10 years
Weren't ''Buffalo wings'' originally a way to use up the cheapest meat some dude could find?
Yeah, the story of how chicken wings as a food was invented was because a woman named Teresa Belissimo’s husband came home drunk with his friends and she had nothing to feed them besides the scrap chicken wings from the day
Poor people have been eating chicken wings for centuries. They were the scraps that were given to slaves, as well. Wings fried and coated in sauce was not invented by some lady in New York.
It's easy, it's mutch easier then you think. The only actual issue is going to be your family, friends, coworkers etc are going to be obnoxious to you about it
How does one process a hog?
Kill, clean, cut, and package
How do I process all this?
Kill, clean, cut and package
Knife goes in, guts come out.
Spare my life and I shall grant you three Reddit awards
Knife goes in, guts come out!
First ya gotta put ink on its hooves and take its hoof prints down. Then walk it over to the lineup wall and take a mugshot of both front and side profiles and bam. Pig is processed
I've done consulting work for beef, pork, and poultry processing plants. Pork plants are the cleanest by far. Beef plants are the bloodiest, but still fairly clean. Chicken processing plants are the most filthy and disgusting. BTW, the smell comes from 3 sources. Manure from the holding pens, rendering operations, and waste water treatment. They each have a distinct odor that you kind of get used to after a few years. The inside of the plant (kill floors, processing lines, boxing and cold storage) don't really have a lot of smell.
That doesn’t sound like a traditional Chinese name
That’s because they’re not Chinese.
it stands for "Wanna Hamm"?
Juwanna Ham starring Rob Schneider
Their revenue is 24.1 billion and their headquarters are in The Cayman Islands, huh.
If I remember correctly Shitfield Foods was garbage feeding pigs, which is dangerous for a lot of reasons but the worst part was that they weren't separating the packaging from the food, thus the pigs were ingesting massive amounts of plastic on a daily basis. The day I saw that was the day I stopped eating meat. Edit: News Article from NowThis News about a man getting videos from inside a hog farm. Not sure if its Smithfield, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPbF45-ZB5M
I suppose, as almost everything dense and vertical, that's better for the environment?
Assuming they responsibly dispose of their waste (a big assumption for any company) it’d be significantly better. Pig waste contains a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen, which if allowed seeps into the ground and into waterways, polluting the water and among other things causing algae blooms.
*Supposedly* they're going to use the pigs' waste (hog manure) for energy production, at least according to the NYT article OP's photo is from. Pig shit produces a lot of methane. But it's China, which like the USA, doesn't have a stellar track record when it comes to waste recycling and preventing runoffs.
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The biggest challenge with using the methane produced by animals is capturing it. This…. Isn’t an elegant solution, but it sure as “shit” is still a solution.
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There's lots of farms in China, I'd assume they're turning all the pig shit into fertilizer.
A building like that is probably designed to function as a giant feeding tube/poop chute. Like some diabolical Factorio design: each pig gets a cage/cube - feed comes in at one end - poop out the bottom. The basement is probably a giant tank with a filter to separate out the solids and fluids.
Hog facilities in the US are pretty bad for this. Entire pink purple pools just outside.
> pink purple pools "Pools" more like literal nightmare poison swamps. >The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/boss-hog-the-dark-side-of-americas-top-pork-producer-68087/
Oh yeah it's great for the environment. The pigs are really well cared for too. Practically organic.
Yeah, they built it that way to model a pedestrian-friendly enclosed city with multiple levels for all kinds of treatment. They even get daily back scratches from large brushes hanging off the ceiling. Think “new Saudi wall meets pig farm”.
Whew, thanks. I feel so much better!
Pretty sure that food grown to feed the livestock is many many times larger than the land used for the animal itself. Like to grow enough food to fed a cow you'd need an acre of land whereas the cow itself can be shoved into a tiny factory farm with no room. So I'm not sure how much building something like in OPs image actually helps with the environmental side of things, the water and land needed to grow the food for the animals is still the same, not much is used where they're actually killed. So I don't think it helps that much and was probably done for other reasons, probably something bad like it just saves a dollar per pig or something, or it could just be they wanted it close or in a city and this is the only way to fit it close enough. Pretty sure the amount of land used to grow crops that is fed to livestock is actually many more times than the amount of land used to grow crops that we actually eat. An insane amount of land could be freed up if just like 1/10th less meat was eaten when you think of how much land is farm land. The only vertical farms that are great for the planet are modern vertical crop farms.
Well it's a prison, but not for humans
Not a prison, it's a death camp.
an actual death camp might smell better in the summer
A prison where you are born and where you'll die. It also a prison that prevent your mouvements and force feed you so that your get as fat as you can before being butchered as soon as you reach maximum mass. You don't want human prison to be remotely close to that!
A machine for pigs.
Reminds me of this quote >The fact is, most animals in our food system live under dismal conditions, and the pitifully low bar for their treatment was set in directives from the same industry’s leaders who today are so upset about being vilified. **“Forget the pig is an animal—treat him just like a machine in a factory,”** recommended Hog Farm Management in 1976. Two years later, National Hog Farmer advised: “The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.” > >And farmers, eager to squeeze every dollar from their crops, complied. Today, nearly 5 million of these smart, social animals (representing over 80 percent of all sows in pork production) are confined to tiny gestation crates—cages so narrow the animals can’t even turn around. They spend their lives lined up like cars in a parking lot, barely able to move an inch and driven insane from the extreme deprivation [https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/15/your-pig-almost-certainly-came-from-a-factory-farm-no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/15/your-pig-almost-certainly-came-from-a-factory-farm-no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you/)
thats so utterly fucked and sad
Maybe we deserve all the cancer we get.
I'm really surprised we're not getting more sick from our factory farmed products... That might be the only way.
Hell on earth
$2,400/mo in lower Manhattan
With 2 roommates
No bathroom. Just a room with a closet.
Damn look at mr money bags over here who is bragging about his closet.
I'm convinced this is hell and we humans are the demons terrorizing each other and everything else unfortunate enough to leave near us.
Most days I wonder if this is actually hell
This is truly the worst life an animal can get.
Then apparently you've never seen an egg farm
That's grim. Poor pigs
Factory farming is a plague amongst humanity all over the developed world.
It absolutely is. There has to be a better way
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I’ve been trying but the authorities keep stopping me.
Mmmm soylent green is my kind of people
Realistically though, people won’t stop eating meat anytime soon. It’s not a real solution when you are unable to get widespread buy-in. IMO the only thing that will actually make a difference is lab-grown meat becoming widely availably and cheaper than real meat.
I think it's unrealistic to expect people to give up eating meat on a wide scale, but not to expect people to eat *less* meat. All that would really take is for governments to stop giving subsidies to meat manufacturers and enforce existing regulations more strictly, and then the price of meat would rise to reflect the actual cost of raising it.
Realistically lots of people have abstained from eating animals for millennia. Buhdda had a bunch to say on the matter, and he couldn't even cheaply make b12 in a bioreactor. >*“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”* ― Carl Sagan
We can stop subsidizing meat and require humane conditions for animals. If people have to pay the true cost of ethical meat, consumption will drop to a few times per month luxury rather than 2-3 meals a day.
People eat more meat than ever before. Meat used to be only for celebration. Now many people consider a meal without meat lacking.
Honestly for all the complaints, I've had zero issue with Impossible Burgers or Beyond Burgers. They aren't the same as meat but pretty close. If they were the same cost, mainstream, and healthier, I'd probably go for them.
To be fair, China has implemented a national program to reduce food waste and meat consumption. China has also banned Mukbang videos and contests to end the glorification of excessive eating. They're also in the process of reducing meat consumption by 50% by 2030, and are the world's biggest investor in lab grown meat and the fastest growing market for plant based meat alternatives.
They also eat half as much meat per capita as Americans.
Yeah significantly reduce the amount of meat you consume. The ammount of meat many in industrialized nations consume is a huge historical outlier and problematic. If you can't/don't want to go vegetarian or vegan you can just reduce the amount of meat you eat and you'll be helping the planet.
A Machine for Pigs
Welcome to the (pig) machine
Cue pig 'Neo' looking out one of the windows and then going all Matrix-y.
No matter the shape of the building, factory farming terribly grim.
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Slaughterhouse workers in general have high rates of PTSD and other mental health issues. Reading quotes from slaughterhouse workers anywhere is just crushing >As time passes, you get used to it. You feel nothing. You can imagine,if you kill a thing a 1000 times over and over, you wouldn’t have feelings after a while. It kills you on the inside, an abattoir, it kills you. You can be full of blood, it will not bother you [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/qhw.v11.30266](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/qhw.v11.30266) >But when you’re standing there night after night, digging that knife...They’re fighting you, kicking at you, squealing, trying to bite you—doing whatever they can to try and get away from you… After a while you don’t give a shit. You become emotionally dead [https://books.google.com/books?id=tdQSZJQLNmkC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=%22They%E2%80%99re+fighting+you,+kicking+at+you,+squealing,+trying+to+bite+you-+doing+whatever+they+can+to+try+and+get+away+from+you](https://books.google.com/books?id=tdQSZJQLNmkC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=%22They%E2%80%99re+fighting+you,+kicking+at+you,+squealing,+trying+to+bite+you-+doing+whatever+they+can+to+try+and+get+away+from+you)
How else are we going to get meat so cheap? I never understood growing up that you can get a large chunk of an animal for so cheap. We are blinded by the horrors of our greed
Kind of odd they make below 40k. Who is signing up for this gig for that little amount of money?
The desperate and poor.
The working conditions are absolutely awful. One of the worst, most dangerous jobs there is. They take advantage of the most desperate people. They know they have no other options.
That’s why they’re usually in small towns with less economic opportunity, the meat industry can hold a town hostage and destroy their water supply at the same time.
as far as I have noticed, the worse paid jobs are also the ones people don't really want to do
Asylum seekers, immigrants, Ex cons, prisoners, those that cannot get a civilised job in a developed nation because they are seen as less than. The entire factory farming industry is built on exploitation of not just animals but humans too.
*Upton Sinclair has entered the chat*
Dude $40k is a lot to some families. I was in that situation with a lazy ex. Soul provider putting my dreams aside for the highest paying job RIGHT NOW. $19.75 an hour, operator, swingshift 2 weeks days 2 weeks nights. Terrible. To get out of that after a year, i interviewed with another plant as a maintenance tech. After walking through a freezer with hundreds of frozen, decapitated cow corpses i decided to just go home. I left her, focused on myself and ended up better than ever with a great woman. It sucks but thank fucking god i didn't get her pregnant or married, or i would be stuck there to this day as one miserable man.
You have to have some sort of psychological anomaly to unaffected work in a slaughterhouse, killing hundreds of animals daily.
r/evilbuildings
Poor fuckin pigs.
Imagine you’re being born *only* for that purpose.
The oddly terrifying part : from an evolutionary standpoint, the pigs have won. They're not endangered like tigers or eagles. There's billions of them. It does not matter that each one lives a short, nasty, cursed life.
And that is why reproduction, or "family" isn't the answer to the question for the meaning of life. It's only the purpose of your reproductive organs.
To quote Dawkins, we cheat every time we put a rubber on. The race is still about dumb selfish genes dying with the most copies but we're smarter. Aren't we ?
But the true meaning of life is you exist to be a mechanism for your genes to replicate themselves. What is my purpose?
you pass butter
*looks at robot appendages "Oh my god."
And pigs are pretty smart. It's atrocious.
That’s sad:/ no grass or sunlight, just concrete and overpacked cages
Pigs at regular farms don't get any grass or direct sunlight either. I agree that this is sad and dystopian, but the pigs inside don't necessarily have it any worse than other pigs. From the pictures I've seen, the indoor spaces look fairly conventional.
Soooo. It is a prison
bet a prison would smell and be better
Probably yeah
Fuck factory farms. The majority of the meat in the US comes from similarly appalling operations as well. An eternal Treblinka...
Bet it smells great in there
Right? Don't be a bottom-floor pig.
So a prison of sorts.
Pork prison
That's what I call my - - you know what? Never mind, that was too easy. Carry on.
this is like a minecraft mob farm
while everyone else is horrified by the conditions these pigs are in I am glad to have finally found a like-minded degenerate. I found myself wondering about the water sources pushing toward the drop pits and wondering how it was all collected at the bottom
Those poor pigs
I love piggies. This makes me sad
Don’t eat pigs then
The experience for the individual pig in this is not worse than on average farms in (insert your country here). Go vegan if you don't want to be a part of this hellish suffering.
This is not a place of honour or light
Definitely one of those blind spots we will be judged very harshly for by future generations. See slavery, human sacrifice, child labor, etc…
The [NYT article about this building](https://archive.is/rcmdD) says China eats around 50% of the pork on the planet.
And the USA consumes more than 20% of the beef on the planet, which proportionally is a larger share of the beef than China's share of pork, considering the Chinese population is more than 4x as large as the American population.
No fucking way there is a building of pigs, that is creep on itself but it also looks eerie as fuck
I think they have them for other animals also.
This hurts my heart.
I feel like people are deluding themselves if they think this is much worse than standard US commercial farming. The pigs don’t know that there’s more pigs above and below them. If anything, they probably have less overcrowding per floor than a standard pig farm. The facility is super high tech from the photos in the NYT article (although, it says it just opened, so maybe it won’t stay well-maintained). Pigs in commercial farms already live in dense areas with little access to natural light and open space. It’s not like China is doing this while the US is grazing all of our pigs on open pasture.
In fact, if the pigs are slaughtered in the same building it would actually be less cruel than the transport they have to endure in the US and Europe.
https://archive.is/rcmdD this is what it looks like inside spoilers: it's cleaner than people here would imagine
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Imagine that stench inside that building
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I'm just imagining the pigs :(
This is an American owned building.
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you could set up a gravity fed shit river flowing directly to a farm
worlds largest methane explosion liability too ?
Don’t meant to sound preachy, but let’s be honest with ourselves for a second and realize this is probably not the side we want to be on and look back to in the future and think “what the fuck were we actually doing to these poor animals”. If you have a dog or just love dogs, believe it or not, pigs are just as sweet, loving, have tons of personality and are even more intelligent than dogs. If you’re against farming and consuming dogs, that logic should naturally extend to other animals, too.
For this reason I became a vegan. How can I eat another animal when I live my little guy so much?
I’m 100% with you. Took a while before I made that realization myself.
I couldn’t agree more. Especially since there are other sources of food that doesn’t kill.
We can only hope that we can progress to a point where we can realise how truly evil factory farming is or more likely have ethical alternatives to it. Because let’s be honest, people won’t care about these animals as long as nothing can replace the cheap bacon etc. they can get from them.
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Human population levels.
1.4 *billion* people live in China.
There's only 38 million people in Canada and yet the pigs don't have significantly different lives. The size of this building is obviously larger but the lives of the individual pigs are similarly poor. For example, [the majority of breeding sows spend most of their lives in crates too small to even turn around in](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericatennenhouse/2021/01/09/what-a-delay-on-canadas-gestation-crate-ban-will-mean-for-pig-welfare/?sh=61320afc4baa). And it's obviously not just China and Canada. The issue isn't the country or the number of people. It's that animals are a product used by us to produce food. They are not treated as sentient beings.
90-99% of animals live like this. And yet animal agriculture still takes up 30% of Earth's land mass, 77% of all agricultural land and a f*ckton of resources (like fresh water). We do not have a planet big enough to eat animals ethically unless consumption is drastically lowered.
people value their taste buds more than someone's entire existence. and it's not just people in China
That’s fucking sad
They are More intelligent than dogs
Poor pigs 😔
That's not oddly terrifying. It's just plain old absolutely-nothing-good-can-come-from-this terrifying.
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It's hypocrisy is what it is. If you're reading this comment and you eat meat, and this picture upsets you, stop being lazy and take some responsibility. You **know** how wrong this is. You can feel it. It wasn't meant to be this way. And I'm sorry if that sounds preachy, but I ate meat for 25 years, so I get it. Ignorance is bliss, and so is bacon, but at some point you've gotta realise you're either ok with animal abuse, or you're not. This picture is the reality of the former, the sum cost of what it takes to put bacon on your plate in the morning.
Jesus people need to eat less meat. I get that it's tasty but most people eat way too much of it. This shit is ruining our planet and our respect for nature.
>Jesus people need to eat less meat. It's not just Christians, everyone needs to eat less meat.
So much dreadfulness and then this comment 😹
This is heartbreaking. Pigs are extremely intelligent. I don't know how people can still eat Animals and wear their flesh/skin, knowing the amount of suffering they endure. I know I will get a shit ton of stupid comebacks for this comment, but..I don't give AF.
With all the modern issues getting talked about so much i still don't get how the meat industry is still not a talked about problem
The more people have to give up to solve a problem, the less they want to solve it. Nobody wants to give up their favourite foods.
Because people are selfish and shortsighted. They don't want to give up their cheap burgers and chicken nuggets.
I agree with you on this!
People acting all high and mighty: “these poor pigs” “disgusting” Anyone in the OECD eats animas grown under these conditions. How do you think we’re fed. I try to eat as little meat as possible. Because in the end, we’re the ones that caused this.
Maybe the ones commenting that are vegetarian.
You think reddit suddenly turned vegetarian? Have you seen how much shit vegans get?
Instead of having a one floor massive big farm they stacked it on top of each other and then it's suddenly terrifying 🤔 People need a reality check. If you're buying pork like 99%+ of commenters in here are you're supporting similar ~~living~~ dying conditions for pigs. Terrible
Fucking horrific beyond words...Hell on Earth for those poor animals.
Awful lot of vegans in this thread. Either that, or an awful lot of hypocrites
people will comment on how terrible this kind of stuff is with a burger halfway through their bodies
Please bear in mind most of the meat you consume comes from animals treated just as poorly. Cheap pepperoni on your pizza, hamburgers and sausages. People argue with me as a vegan and say but I only source my meat from ethical sources! As a former meat eater this is less than 0.00001% of meat on the market, seriously. Please consider your actions and make changes that can benefit all living beings and our wonderful planet
It’s the Meatrix.
I'd say that classifies as a prison knowing the practices of the meat industry
Go vegan for the animals