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According to the UK's National Pig Association, thousands of pigs across the country are backed up on farms, primarily because of a lack of processing capacity in pork plants due to labour shortages. Major pork processors have reported vacancy rates of 10-15%.
On-farm culling has begun on a handful of farms to ease the pressure. Some processors are putting on extra kills, for example on Saturdays, with pigs exported with minimal butchering to markets in Asia paying relatively low prices. In some cases, this has affected the main measure of the UK pig prices, the Standard Pig Price (SPP), which fell by nearly 5p last week.
The first six months of 2021 saw the industry record its worst financial performance on record, with producers losing on average around £25/pig over a prolonged period, mainly due to record costs of production, underpinned by high feed input prices. The current quarter has seen costs remain high, while the pig price has deteriorated, due to the current constraints in processing plants and also dropping EU prices.
There are also bans on exports to China from certain key pork plants due to previous COVID-19 outbreaks among workers, the collapse of the cull sow price due to oversupply in Europe, and a big drop in EU exports due in part to new Brexit checks introduced in January, as well as oversupply in the EU and a fall of in China shipments.
Pig slaughterings are about 4% up on last year so far this year and average carcase weights, recorded by AHDB, topped 90kg again in late-September, 4kg higher than a year ago when they were also on the rise, and 4kg higher than early-August, less than three months ago.
October 9, 2021/ NPA/ United Kingdom.
http://www.npa-uk.org.uk
