New Faces, Quarterly Numbers, and a Genetics Question We Are Not Rushing

I hope everyone is well.

It has been a busy month on the farm, including some welcome new additions to the team.

Welcoming Andie and Ami-Jade

We are delighted to welcome Andie to the pig team. He will be responsible for looking after the rearing and feeding herd. Andie joins us with 15 years of pig experience before taking a break from the industry. He wanted to get back in, and we are really pleased to have him. He has made a fantastic start.

At the same time, we thank Jack for his contributions over the last 18 months or so. He has left us to head back into the poultry industry, and we wish him well.

In the office, we have waited a long time between appointing Ami-Jade and her actually starting, and we are thrilled to have her on board. Her job is to keep me, and the wider office, organised. She brings genuinely strong skills around people, prioritising and efficiency, and my diary has never looked so tidy. Anyone who has spent five minutes trying to get hold of me will appreciate how big a step forward that is.

Quarterly breeding herd review

We have just been through our quarterly breeding herd review with AgroVision, and they have started producing a new report grouped by herd size. That has been really useful because it lets us compare more like for like with farms running similar systems, rather than against the entire population.

On the headline numbers, we are sitting in the top 25% for:

• Pigs weaned per litter: 14.12
• Pigs weaned per sow per year: 32.83
• Litters per sow per year: 2.32
• Pre-weaning mortality: 4.12%, which is exceptionally low

Full credit to the team for these results over the last 12 months. These are not numbers you can spreadsheet your way to. They come from people being on the floor, paying attention, and doing the small things consistently.

The bit we have not pushed on

We try to be honest with ourselves on the numbers that are not as strong as they could be.

Our numbers born per litter sits at 14.71. The average across the 46 similar size herds in our group is 14.84, so we are slightly behind there. Some others in the group are averaging over 16.5 liveborn per litter, which is well ahead of us.

The point worth making, though, is that our exceptionally low pre-weaning mortality means we are still ahead of some farms in terms of pigs actually weaned, even though they are starting with more born alive. Born is a useful number. Weaned is the one that pays the bills.

The genetics question

We are now reviewing genetics to see whether we can push the liveborn numbers up. The straightforward thing would be to chase the higher liveborn averages we are seeing across the group. We are not going to do that quickly.

If a change in genetics pushed liveborn up but came at the cost of our pre-weaning mortality, we would end up no better off, and potentially worse off, with more pressure on the team and the buildings. We are not prepared to compromise on that 4.12% figure to chase a born number that may not translate into weaned pigs.

So this is a careful review, not a quick decision. We will be looking hard at what other producers in our group are running, what their mortality figures look like alongside their born numbers, and whether there is a route to lift liveborn without giving up the survivability we have worked hard to build.

Pigs Tomorrow

Finally, it was great to attend Pigs Tomorrow in the middle of the month, and to sit on one of the panels. Around 250 people were there, with lots of positivity in the room and, encouragingly, a far broader age range than we have seen at industry events before. That feels important. The industry needs younger people in it, asking different questions.

Useful updates from AHDB, DEFRA and Red Tractor, and good discussions on sustainability and on the likely transition away from conventional farrowing places. None of that is going to slow down, so the more time we spend talking properly about it, the better placed we are when decisions need to be made.

If you want to talk team, performance, or what we are seeing on genetics, drop us a message.