Archive Article: 2000/12/08
Dennis Bridgeford
Dennis Bridgeford farms
50ha (125 acres) at Petley
Farm in Easter Ross, north
of Inverness. The farm
comprises a 480-sow
indoor unit producing 95kg
pigs for one outlet and 85kg
pigs for a local abattoir. A
further 320 sows are run
outdoors. Land not used for
pigs grows spring barley
AS WE reach the end of another year it is a natural time to reflect on decisions that have been taken.
On the whole I think I got more right than wrong and we have just held in there with prices rising steadily over the year.
Our pregnancy tester gave up on us after 17 years of constant use, so for the first time in over two years I have bought a new piece of equipment.
In the past – with stalls – pregnancy testing was relatively easy, but loose housing has made it more difficult. With this in mind, I decided to go for a machine that does not have a cable connecting the headset to the probe.
A small transmitter on the end of the new probe sends the signal. The improvement has been nothing short of remarkable. We have eliminated the problem with the old type – the sows tail catching the cable and pulling the headset off your ears.
Over the years we have spent lots of money to combat the smell of pig slurry; it is still the downside of pig production. With the impending arrival of more legislation I have been looking into ground injection.
The main drawback is the cost, but our local agricultural engineering firm has built a budget model designed for waste liquid from the whisky industry. We are going to give it a trial. It might just make me slightly more popular with my neighbours and at least it shows that we are trying to tackle the smell problem.
I normally give lunch invitations a wide berth but I received one recently for the launch of a new range of pig diets. The main speaker, to add a bit of controversy to the meeting, was a Danish pig consultant who I have heard on two other occasions.
The main points he brought out were that the Danes had no intention of giving up sow stalls in the foreseeable future and that only 15% of pigmeat produced in Denmark meets UK welfare standards. That knocks a hole in some of the waffle given out by the supermarkets. He is also involved in a pig business in Poland and claims that the cost of production there is 50p/kg: Now that is scary. *
Dennis Bridgeford is scared by the prospect that the cost of producing pigs in Poland is only 50p/kg.