Pig health website up for sale

13 July 2001



Pig health website up for sale

By James Garner

THE LARGEST pig health website in Europe is up for sale following a collapse in income due to the foot-and-mouth crisis.

The website www.pighealth.com was being run by the Pig Disease Information Centre, which is a registered non-clinical vet practise specialising in pig health.

The website offered farmers swine disease and health advice as well as products and services.

Since the onset of foot-and-mouth it has suffered a downturn in paid work from the pig industry and specialist vet practices.

Exports have also been hit by overseas companies fears that they could import the disease, said Mike Meredith, PDIC director.

We have survived so far by cutting staff, but now we are forced to sell our most precious asset the pighealth.com web-site in order to survive.

According to PDIC the website had 20,000 users recording 3m hits annually. It hopes the site is an attractive proposition for international agribusiness.

PDIC will focus on training and swine health research.

This is the latest in a series of agricultural e-commerce ventures which have faltered in recent weeks.

Earlier this month Globalfarmers, the online agricultural trading platform, went into voluntary receivership with an unspecified amount of debt.

And last month it was announced that agricultural internet site Farmgate was closing its web-trading facility, backing out of the e-commerce market.

• Farming News to cease publication, FWi, 26 June 2001
• Globalfarmers calls in receivers, FWi, 05 July 2001