ACMC aims to play key role in pig drive

Driffield-based pig breeder ACMC is expecting good business out of a British Pig Executive drive to make the Two Tonne Sow the industry standard.
By The Newsroom
Published 18th Jun 2010, 16:39 BST
Updated 18th Jun 2010, 16:39 BST

The target of the 2TS project, announced at the Pig and Poultry Fair last month, is an average of two tonnes of pigmeat a year being grown from the offspring of every breeding sow. The existing British average is 1,608 kgs, compared to 2,000 kgs over the EU as a whole.

BPEX has said: "Closing this performance gap is crucial to ensure long-term competitiveness. Producers need to ensure they are in position to sustain profitability when the market place and exchange rates are less favourable."

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The British industry has to overcome the disadvantage of not being allowed to castrate male pigs, which means sending them to slaughter before they are big enough for their flesh to acquire 'boar taint'.

ACMC is promoting itself as part of the solution. Some of its customers are already hitting the 2TS target, it says, using the latest products of its genetic selection of breeding animals – including a sow it calls the Meidam, which includes the best traits of the hyper-prolific Meishan pig, from China.

Some Meishans were imported to the UK in the 1980s and ACMC has used selected descendants of them to largely replace the Landrace in the adaptations of the Large White which are its main products.

Technical director Ed Sutcliffe, who grew up on a pig farm near Harrogate, says ACMC leads the breeding industry in summing up progress in terms of pounds and pence.

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In the past two years, he said, ACMC's genetic improvements had made it possible to cut 6.18 off the costs of 80kgs of deadweight pig – from a combination of litter size, survival rates and feed conversion efficiency. For a Two Tonne Sow, that would amount to 151 extra profit a year.

He said: "We want to get over the message that we are improving the available stock year on year and it may be worth reducing herd size to get more out of the sows that you have."

BPEX has developed a sow productivity calculator to help producers pinpoint which areas of performance to prioritise – www.2TS.org. uk or ask BPEX for help.

CW 19/6/10