Farmer Focus: Ration tweaks cut soya but sums not adding up
Jack Bosworth © MAG/Colin Miller I hope everyone is well. Dare I say it, but we could do with some rain now.
That said, the dry start to the year has been a blessing for getting slurry out for both ourselves and our customers, particularly given the new dribble bar has had a number of breakdowns, which have been a big frustration.
See also: How do field beans and forage stack up in pig diets?
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I was delighted to give a presentation to the Darlington Pig Discussion Group recently, albeit over Teams, which is never the same as being there in person.
I spent about 90 minutes talking all about the business, and how we have progressed over the past few years, while also highlighting our weaknesses and how we plan to turn them into strengths.
One area I discussed was farm emissions and our passion for trying to lead the way within our industry.
As previously mentioned, we are delighted to be one of the 170 farms to have been chosen to be in the AHDB’s environmental baselining pilot project, a contract we signed with them in the latter half of last year.
We really wanted to be a part of the project following a farm emissions report that was undertaken on our business by Ceres Rural (back in March 2023) using the Future Farm Resilience Fund.
The biggest concern for us – and nearly all other pig producers – will be the impact of soya and how some of it is sourced.
Soya is responsible for more than 80% of our emissions from feed and needs addressing.
We took the opportunity to look at some of the rations over the years, to see what improvements we have made so far, and are in discussions with our nutritionist to further reduce soya inclusion.
From 2018-2025, we have managed to reduce soya inclusion in one of our home mill-and-mix diets from 20.7% to 14.9%.
This has mainly been achieved by increasing the inclusion of cold-pressed rapemeal, which has gone from 2.5% to 10%.
Back in March 2018, we were paying £294.96/t and £210.82/t for soya and rapemeal, respectively, whereas at the same point in 2025, we paid £330.55/t and £262.25/t.
With the inclusion adjustments costed in at today’s prices, there is no cost-benefit to us from changing to rapemeal to help the environment – in fact, we are losing 50p/t of finished mix.