Being a vegetarian, it is a little hard for me to smile on a design proposal about pig farming. Nevertheless, I was totally taken with Dutch architecture group MVRDV‘s clever (and I think tongue-in-cheek?) urban design proposal for a “Pig City” – consisting of huge skyscrapers filled to the brim with automated pig farms.
In 2000, pork was the most consumed form of meat at 80 billion kg per year. Recent animal diseases such as Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth disease are raising serious questions about pork production and consumption. Two opposing reactions can be imagined. Either we change our consumption pattern and become instant vegetarians [unfathomable!!] or we change the production methods and demand biological farming.
Is it me or does it strike everyone that they been watching The Matrix a bit too much?
)
Land area in Europe is so precious that farming has to be in high-rise structure. Don’t despair Jill, because you can alternately set-up automated vegie-cities with pig-cities. Though, pig-cities has to be well-engineered in terms of containing air-polution emanating from those structures, and draining their waste in a digestion tank to create biogas or methane. The slurry by-product of biogas will be dried up to be used as a fertilizer. The effluent from the digestion tank would be cleansed or filtered by vegie-cities. Lots of pumps and other high-tech machines to be used here that consumes electricity! Solution?… Use biogas and solar power to run all the machines. The entire farming city would also be a hybrid power plant as well.
Sheldon, this is Engineering Matrix in practical application, using available resources that would compliment one another.
Lorenzo II
Philippines
[...] + MVRDV’s Pig City [...]