farm-link - News

Investing in pigs A Bedfordshire family is investing heavily to improve the efficiency of their pig production.      Following a review of their total farming operations, David Witherick and his sons, Jeremy and Jonathan, decided to expand their breeding herd and switch to finishing the progeny rather than selling weaners from their Winsey Farm site at Sharnbrook.      A new 24-pen ARM farrowing house is already in use to cater for the extra throughput following an increase in sow numbers from 300 to 400, and two 600-place ARM finishing houses are currently being erected.      “To get maximum benefit, we decided to go for state-of-the-art finishing houses, with pipeline feeding to reduce feed costs and slats with slurry piped directly to a lagoon, to reduce labour. MLC figures show that with liquid feeding, together with the use of         co-products, we should be able to reduce feed costs by 14 p per kg of pigmeat sold,” said Jonathan.      With a write-off period of 10 years the family will be committed to pig production for the next decade, but believe that pigs are a good bet, despite spending “several hundred thousand pounds”.  They have 600 acres of arable and also produce 4,000 turkeys for the Christmas trade.      “We thought it would be difficult to improve returns from the arable side and the turkeys are a niche market which couldn’t easily be expanded,” said Jeremy. “One of our men had to retire early due to ill-health so we decided to contract-out most of the arable work and concentrate our energies on the pigs, which we understand, enjoy and  are good at.        The family also reasoned that the person to whom they sold their weaners must have made money out of them, so finishing their own would boost their own margin per sow.  The herd — which is a multiplier unit for JSR Genetics, producing Gold X gilts — is currently rearing between 22 and 23 pigs per sow a year.      David Witherick — a past NFU Pigs’ Committee chairman — believes that, with a run of reasonable prices, it is still possible for the British pig industry to grow, but only if people are prepared to invest to improve their efficiency.