Comments on: Environmental Design Fail

By: equinox216

equinox216 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:58:38 +0000

1. Hear about vertical pig farms
2. Copyright the term “shitscraper”
3. ???
4. Profit!

By: supergp

supergp — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:17:24 +0000

Clearly they’ll keep the pigs warm by burning the feces!

By: Chris Russell

Chris Russell — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:48:39 +0000

As others have said, pigs are very clean when given the opportunity. And yet, on a vertical pig farm, I’m not thinking they’ll have the opportunity.

By: lilacsigil

lilacsigil — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:41:15 +0000

If you feed your pigs properly and keep them clean, they don’t stink. There’s a faint, warm smell of manure, but that’s it. I don’t eat pork, bacon or ham because I can’t get properly farmed pig meat. (There is an organic, ecologically-sound farm near where I live but it ships all its pigs to the city!) But I don’t think that’s the kind of piggery you’re going to get in the US.

By: Bender

Bender — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:55:51 +0000

Break a deal, face the wheel!!

By: goblin

goblin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:32:58 +0000

Also, i think that what they are fed affect the smell a LOT. High protein (often animal protein) commercial feeds pretty much makes the shit look like tar. On the other hand, the basic vegetable high fiber diet makes for a completely different thing.
HUGE influence. those lagoons mentioned by the poster further above? they’re from CAFO”s, an industry buzzword for “confined animal feed operation”. these farms can breed many more animals per plot, but the quality suffers big time. PETA occasionally goes out to the worst of the worst for pictures, doing a bit of real activism for once.

although, here in the states at least, many feeds also are based off of corn. lots and lots of corn.

oh god, the goggles…

By: Liam

Liam — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:13:39 +0000

They must be trying to make Canada undesirable again.

By: Rattsu

Rattsu — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:12:34 +0000

The funny thing here is that when I studied environmental science at the university we took a visit to an ecological pig farm here in sweden. It smelled just like your normal stable for horses, that is not very much at all if you are used to the countryside. Since sweden is cold they spent a lot of time indoors, but the large pens themselves were separated, with the major area on the bottom filled with straw so that you pretty much just saw the upper backs of the pigs. Then there was the toilet area upstairs. The pigs were surprisingly clean, and did not use the main area as their toilet at all. They never do if given a choice.

In contrast, normal pig farms do stink to high heaven. Oh yes they do.

By: goblin

goblin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0000

oh god, the mental imagery…

By: Zifnab

Zifnab — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:42:18 +0000

I don’t really see why you’d want or need a factor pig farm in the middle of down town anywhere. Part of the reason you want to grow vegetables close to home stems from the fact that once you pick a berry or dig up a cucumber, the food starts to go bad.

By contrast, you can take a pig out of its pen and drag it anywhere you want without fear the pig will sour before you kill it. So city-centric slaughter houses might make a certain degree of sense. But city-centric breeding pens? Not so much.

Not to mention the fact that factor farms are somewhat horrific and brutal. Imagine looking across from your office skyrise to the building down the street and seeing poxed swine packed check to jowel in their own shit. Somehow, I think it would reduce the demand for pork products.

By: Tenken347

Tenken347 — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:14:08 +0000

Actually, gravity can do a fair bit to help with the waste situation. A simple system of sluices can be used to funnel the waste down the tower and into containment vessels, which can then, I would hope, be properly dealt with. As for the cold, I’m not sure what they’re hoping to do there. Pigs are fairly robust animals, but below zero temperatures are probably pushing it. Theoretically, they could alternate open and enclosed floors to deal with the situation. That’s just me brainstorming, though.

By: Joshua R

Joshua R — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:30:13 +0000

We had a small farm when i was growing up, and about a dozen pigs. Just walking through the barn in the morning to check on them was enough to permeate your clothing with the manure stink so badly that you needed to shower and change before you went into town.

No thanks.

By: Illuyankas

Illuyankas — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:55:57 +0000

It’s more an airborne bacon delivery system than a pig farm. This could speed up my morning BLT exponentially, smell be damned.

By: Remus Shepherd

Remus Shepherd — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:27:56 +0000

Many farms combat the smell of their pigs by spraying them twice daily with a naptha compound. This eliminates the smell…but causes cancer for people living miles downwind.

As for the cold, I have no idea how they plan on handling it. There are pig farms as far north as the Dakotas, I know — how do they deal with it? Maybe pigs, like cattle, can handle some level of extreme cold?

Just work on the damn replicator technology, already. I want to slice pig meat out of a kitchen appliance (with a ‘squealing’ button optional).

By: John

John — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:45:27 +0000

Well, Zen, as Tracey Morgan said about the latest stock market downturn “I advise everyone to take a deep breath, calm down and start prepairing your bodies for thunderdome. For that is your new law.”