£2m pig unit boost to industry

Carsten Jakobsen, UK chairman of Tulip, one of Europe's biggest pork buyers, flew in to perform the opening ceremony on Wednesday, and declared it a sign that the industry was on its way up after 10 hard years. The new plant, on Decoy Farm, a former arable farm at Watton Carrs, near Driffield, could take its first pigs in next week.

JSR's main business is breeding and it sells most of its piglets, or contracts out their rearing. But the Decoy Finishing Unit will take a quarter of its national output of weaners – about 800 a week – and take them through to slaughter under JSR management, using just two extra employees to manage up to 8,500 pigs at a time, thanks to the design of the unit.

Tim Rymer, chairman of JSR and son of its founder, John Sykes Rymer, said it would enable them to prove the full potential of their genetically selected pigs.

Although genetics is the foundation of JSR's business, he said, there had been too much emphasis on what science could do for sow productivity, "which totally ignores 55 per cent of the cost of pig production".

He said Britain was ahead on genetics but behind on pig-keeping and tended to measure productivity by the easiest means possible. JSR insisted on MTF – meat per tonne of feed. The new unit, equipped with sophisticated feed distribution and pig separation systems, would enable easy and accurate measurement of what was possible in ideal conditions, he said. The target was 325 kgs MTF, meaning roughly four pigs.

It took a year to get planning permission and it cost 2.17m – about 250 per pig place – including ancillaries like new roadways and a collection system for the slurry – which JSR calls "liquid gold". It would add a quarter-tonne an acre to the yield from wheat on their arable land.

The slurry value is part of the company's calculation it will achieve payback on the investment in seven and a half years.

CW 10/7/10