Anna Longthorp likes looking at her pigs. She stands, hands on hips, with the relaxed gait of a woman used to the challenges of keeping upright in a cracked and furrowed field, and watches her animals. “If your pigs are happy they’ll be more productive,” she says, bluntly. The sturdy porkers in front of us, part Landrace for the long loin, part Duroc for the intra-muscular fat, certainly look the part. Outdoor bred, free range reared, they snuffle in the sandy earth, breaking off to chase each other from one end of their low-density plot to another. Away in the distance are the heavy industry of the Drax and Eggborough power stations, but here, on this reclaimed airfield, is pig heaven.
“A story sells,” Longthorp says, wryly. She knows that the manner in which she raises many of her animals is exactly what a lot of Britain’s food-aware customers want. Attach words such as “outdoor reared” and “free range” to the crackled Sunday roast and the price goes up. If the story is right it will attract a premium.
But the bigger story of the British pig business is nowhere near as straightforward or cheery. It is an example of the way agriculture has become a globalised business; one in which even the produce raised closest to our kitchens is at the mercies of economic imperatives shaped far away. Shoppers may say they want a certain type of product: cared for in Britain by someone like Anna Longthorp; working for a family farm rather than some huge corporation; supplying their meat through as few hands as possible. But the reality can be rather different.
One of the reasons Longthorp likes looking at these pigs, spending their last few weeks on her unit near Snaith on Yorkshire’s East Riding, is that these are the ones she could afford to fatten up herself. The British pig industry goes through cycles of boom and bust and right now it is recovering from a major bust. In response to EU sanctions on Russia for its invasion of the Crimea in 2014, Russia introduced a tit-for-tat embargo on various food stuffs, including pig meat, from western Europe. Germany had ramped up production to meet Russia’s growing appetite. Suddenly that market was gone. That meant oversupply which in turn meant the European-wide price of pig meat plummeted. Britain has not generally exported to Russia. Still Britain’s pig farmers, locked into the European market price, suffered.
It costs about 130p a kilo to produce pork. Earlier this year the price farmers were receiving dropped to just 112p. Many British farmers were losing between £10 and £20 a pig for every one they sold. Longthorp was partly protected from the worst of this. Eight years ago, in her mid-20s, she took over the pig business that had been established by her mother 25 years ago and set up a brand called Anna’s Happy Trotters. It sells her outdoor bred and free range animals and products such as bacon and sausages produced from them. Through hard marketing work, she established a premium price of 220p a kilo for meat sold under that brand, to take account of her much higher costs, and has been able to stick to it. There’s money in a good story.
The business has two units, each with 700 breeding sows, and produces 650 pigs a week for slaughter, at a rate of around 23 piglets a year from each sow, across just over two litters annually. Only a quarter of that is free range due to lack of land. Her more standard production has been subject to lower prices. She also breeds too many pigs for the amount of space she has. She used to send some out for what’s called “bed and breakfasting”: getting another farmer to fatten them up before returning them to her for slaughter. But with prices plummeting she could no longer afford to do this. “I now sell a lot of weaners,” she says, referring to the piglets. “It’s a way of reducing risk and locking in some profit.” She’s not happy about it.
The result of the past few rocky months has, unsurprisingly, been a contraction in the British industry. “We think we can identify about 20,000 breeding sows that have gone out of the national herd,” says Peter Crichton, a pig market expert who writes a trade magazine column on the industry. “That’s about 5% of the breeding herd. In the long term we will be shorter on domestic pork.” In the 1980s the UK breeding herd was more than 800,000. Now it’s fallen below 400,000. At one point we were about 80% self-sufficient in pork. Now it’s 55%. However, because of exports, only 40% of the pork we consume in Britain is actually produced here.
That matters because Britain is unique in the way it raises its animals. In this country while only 2–3% is entirely free range, 40% is outdoor reared and another 30% is raised on straw in open sheds. Accreditation systems such as the Red Tractor mark, which require four visits a year from vets, enforce higher welfare regimes. In the rest of Europe – including the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands – pig farmers have historically followed lower welfare regimes. Almost all of it is intensively reared indoors on a slatted system without straw. This has cost efficiencies. In the straw-based system there’s the obvious cost of the straw and the labour to remove it when it’s soiled. In slatted systems, used for just 30% of UK pig production, faeces simply fall through the floor.
Longthorp’s pigs are raised in circumstances that could be described as bucolic; the slatted system really isn’t pretty. Those who are appalled by the very notion of farming pigs, who regard the realities of the industry described here as repellent, will make little distinction between methods. It will all be atrocious. But to many consumers these things matter, not that retailers always respond. The big supermarkets are still buying lots of this lower welfare pork, much of it imported, for their standard ranges.
That pressure on price has partly come about through the rise of the discounters, Aldi and Lidl. Because they buy small ranges in large volume and spend little on frills, the discounters generally pay a good price and are regarded as good customers. “It’s the way the big four supermarkets try to take them on that’s the problem,” says Crichton. “When foreign pig meat is cheaper than ours they’ll simply bring it in.”
Historically one of the reasons so much of Britain’s pig industry is less intensive is the difficulty of getting planning permission for the facilities. But there is also simply a greater interest in animal welfare in the UK compared to much of continental Europe. There is an understanding that pigs are not dumb; that they need stimulation. As Anna Longthorp says: “The consumer is willing to pay enough if the story is right.”
David Owers, a pig farmer from Lincolnshire these past 45 years, uses an indoor straw-based system. He says he thinks it’s best for welfare, though the supermarkets aren’t prepared to pay enough for it. We stand looking into one of his open-sided sheds, at sprightly pigs, now at around 35kg each, bouncing around bales of hay. “A slatted system would be cheaper but this is the most viable if you care about welfare,” he says.
I suggest the best welfare system actually involves having them free range and outdoors. He disagrees; having sows indoors in crates for weaning stops them rolling over on to piglets. “Our mortality rate is about 5.5%. Outdoor reared systems have a mortality rate of 10% to 13%.” I put this to Longthorp, who surprises me by agreeing. “Our mortality figures aren’t as good as indoors,” she says, as she leads me around the fields housing the breeding unit. Here the sows come and go from the sheds in which they wean. And yes, they lose piglets. “But it’s about quality of life. Truth is, the label doesn’t mean much. You can have good free range and bad free range, good indoor and bad indoor.” So what can the consumer do? “Look for things like the Red Tractor mark,” she says.
One of the big problems for British pig producers is the volatility of the market. After that low of 112p a kilo, producers in Germany slaughtered breeding sows to reduce supply. That lifted prices. Then Brexit happened and the pound began to slide, a nightmare for importers but for exporters paid in euros it was a godsend. Not only was the base price on the up, but so was the value of that currency.
But the greatest international influence on prices has been the Chinese market. The country now produces half of all the pork on the planet. A surprisingly large amount of that production has been on what would be recognised in Britain as a 19th-century model: peasant farmers keeping two or three pigs in their backyard. In the past year the Chinese introduced a new five-year plan to phase out backyard pig rearing and expand modern production. They also want to spread production more evenly around the country, rather than have it concentrated in small pockets. In response to the uncertainty, production in China has plummeted and prices have risen. Pork producers in China are now getting around 220p a kilo, ahead of most premium producers in the UK.
They’ve also been importing more. It used to be just the so-called “fifth quarter” – offal that the British didn’t want. Now they are taking whole animals. Shipments to China from Britain in the year to May were up 72%. China now accounts for half of all British exports. This suggests opportunities for the future. However when prices settle, as they invariably will, it’s likely that the Chinese will come after the intensively reared European production, leaving the British once more out in the cold.
As a result there are expectations that the industry will continue gently to contract and the family-owned model will become increasingly difficult to maintain. You may like the idea of your roast coming from an army of Anna Longthorps. The reality may well be rather different. “What we’ve seen for the past few years,” says Mick Sloyan, pork director of the industry body AHDB, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, “is individual farms staying the same size but being taken over by farming corporations. Already just 16 farm businesses produce 50% of all the pigs in this country.” Currently, he says, there is a market in the UK for the 40% that are outdoor reared and then finished inside on straw. “They’ll be fine.” The rest will just have to hope the supermarkets are prepared to pay enough, or go intensive.
Or farmers will simply quit. Tim Chapman, from North Yorkshire, is one of these. He’s been at it for 36 years. He’s been through spikes in feed price and the foot and mouth crisis. Finally he’s had enough. He’s winding down his 550-strong breeding unit. “In the end it wasn’t just the money we were losing,” he says. “I needed further investment which was going to be tricky and there were staffing issues. It was just everything.” Then he had a conversation with a local butcher and discovered that however little he was paid as the farmer, the processor always made the same profit. “In this industry all the risk goes on the farmer.”
And so another part of Britain’s pig-rearing tradition goes. What does all this mean for the future? In the long term, the pig industry will probably become more like the wine business. At one end will be a high-welfare, low-intensity premium product, flogged to those whose interest in the way the animals they eat are cared for is matched only by the depths of their pockets. The rest of the industry will be buffeted by the cold winds of the international markets. Mainstream consumers may claim an interest in welfare. They may say they want the best. But all too often it comes down to simple pounds and pence. At which point it’s the pigs that suffer.
