Big is beautiful for US pig sector

As the debate about large-scale farming rumbles on, it was interesting to read an article about concentration of the US pig sector in the latest AHDB market survey.

It says the pig sector there is becoming dominated by large-scale producers, the biggest of which, Smithfield Foods, has a sow herd of 880,000 sows - about double that of the entire UK herd. The top eight producers all hold more than 100,000 sows.

The clamour for economies of scale is a reflection of the difficulties they’ve been having with pig profitability caused by high feed costs - something UK producers are all too familiar with. Just goes to show, even if we aren’t prepared to go down the large-scale farming route, others certainly are.