I hope everyone is well.
It feels as though 2026 is already flying by, and in all honesty we are still playing catch up after a bit of time off over Christmas.
One thing we were really hoping to push on with early in the new year was getting some ex-stewardship areas ready for cereal drilling. We needed ideal conditions for a mower pass before cultivations. Instead, we have had 72mm of rain so far, so that plan is not coming to fruition any time soon. I expect it will be spring barley as the harvest 2026 cash crop now, rather than the late winter wheat we had been planning.
On the pigs, I have been taking stock of where we are so far this accounting year, which started on 1 April 2025. I am really happy with the health and performance of the herd, and the figures bear that out.
So far in the nine month period, pigs weaned per sow per year sits at 33.41. A huge factor in that figure is a pre-weaning mortality of just 4%. To put that in context, the top 10% of our benchmarking group is 4.56% and the group average is 12.38%, so a really great job done by the animals and the staff to achieve it.
Our liveborn numbers averaged 14.84 per litter, which is on the low side compared with the top 10% of the group at 17.04. That ranks us 77th of the 148 farms in the group at the time of the last report, whereas for weaned pigs per litter we are placed 22nd. What that tells me is that our balance is in a healthy place. We are in the middle for numbers born but in the top 15% for numbers weaned, so the pressure to push born-alive numbers higher is not quite as it would seem if you looked at that single figure in isolation.
In the rearing and feeding herd, average finished weight has been 100.8kg with an FCR of 2.1, from an entry weight of 8.9kg on average. Other KPIs such as daily liveweight gain and feeding days per pig are harder to compare across the combined benchmarking group, because finishing weights vary so much between producers, but I am happy with our figures of 629g and 146.1 respectively.
Fourth-generation farmer at Spains Hall, Willingale. Runs the contracting team and writes most of what appears here.