Empire of the pig

PIG number 5422 saunters into the pen, circles its few square metres and mounts a plastic stand. The farmer cleans the animal’s underside, feels around and draws out what appears to be a thin pink tube around 30cm long. He begins to massage. Pigs elsewhere snort, grunt or squeal, but the alpha pig is unmoved. Soon he has filled a thermal cup with more than 60 billion sperm. Around 150 pigs will owe their short, brutish lives to this emission.

A malty smell hangs in the air at the Fuxin Breeding Farm in Jiangxi province in central China, 10 hectares of low concrete barns and fields beside a small reservoir, which is home to around 2,000 pigs. The business was started four years ago by 31-year-old Ouyang Kuanxue. Mr Ouyang’s friends say he was destined to be a pig farmer—he was born in the Chinese zodiacal year of the pig—but his own explanation is more prosaic: when he came back to Pingxiang, his hometown, in 2003 after studying management at university in Beijing, he could not think what else to do. His grandfather was a coalminer who kept a few pigs. His father already had 100. He decided to expand.