Cutting Soya Without Cutting Corners: Seven Years of Ration Changes

I hope everyone is well.

Dare I say it, but we could do with some rain. The dry start to the year has been a blessing for getting slurry out, both for ourselves and our contracting customers. That said, the new dribble bar has had a run of breakdowns that have been a real frustration. When you are working to a tight weather window with farmers waiting on you, kit needs to behave.

I was pleased to present to the Darlington Pig Discussion Group recently, albeit over Teams, which is never quite the same as being in the room. I spent around 90 minutes talking through the business, how we have progressed over the last few years, and where our weaknesses are and what we are doing about them. Standing up and being honest about the bits that need work tends to focus the mind more than any internal review.

Why we joined the AHDB Environmental Baselining Pilot

One of the areas I covered in some detail was farm emissions. We feel strongly about trying to lead the way within our industry on this, partly because we think the direction of travel is clear, and partly because the numbers genuinely matter to us as a business.

We were delighted to be one of the 170 farms chosen as a pilot for the AHDB Environmental Baselining Pilot, a contract we signed in the latter half of last year. We wanted to be part of the project after a Farm Emissions Report was undertaken on our business by Ceres Rural in March 2023, using the Future Farm Resilience Fund. That first report gave us a clear baseline. The AHDB pilot is what allows us to track and challenge it properly.

Soya is the single biggest lever

For us, and for nearly every other pig producer I speak to, the biggest concern is soya, and where some of it is sourced. Soya is responsible for over 80% of our emissions from feed. That is not a number you can ignore. If we want to make a meaningful dent in our footprint, the ration is where it has to happen.

So we took the opportunity to look back over our rations and see what we have actually changed.

What we have done between 2018 and 2025

From 2018 to 2025, we have reduced soya inclusion in one of our home mill and mix diets from 20.7% down to 14.9%. That has been achieved mainly by increasing cold-pressed rapemeal, which has gone from 2.5% up to 10%. Both numbers come from the same diet, mixed in the same mill, so this is a like-for-like comparison rather than a marketing one.

We are now in discussions with our nutritionist about pulling soya inclusion down further.

What it has cost us

This is the part that often gets glossed over in sustainability conversations, so it is worth being straight about.

Back in 2018, for the month of March, we paid £294.96 per tonne for soya and £210.82 per tonne for rapemeal. At the same point in 2025, we paid £330.55 per tonne for soya and £262.25 per tonne for rapemeal.

Once you factor today’s prices into the new inclusion rates, the actual cost benefit of the change works out at a negative of around £0.50 per tonne of finished mix. So we are slightly worse off on a pure feed cost basis, but with materially less soya in the diet and a clearer story to tell on emissions.

For us, that is a price we are prepared to pay. We are not chasing a number to put in a brochure. We are trying to position the business properly for where pig production is heading, and we would rather make these changes deliberately, in our own time, than have them forced on us in a hurry.

Where next

The next step is another conversation with the nutritionist about how much further we can reasonably push the rapemeal inclusion without compromising performance, and what else we can bring into the diet from home-grown sources. We mill on-site using solar generated electricity, so anything we can grow on the farm and feed back through our own pigs tightens the loop further.

We will keep reporting honestly on what we are doing, what it costs, and what works. That is the only way the industry moves forward on this.

If you want to talk about home milling, ration changes, or the AHDB pilot, the kettle is on.