The UK pig industry requires about 1,500 new buildings — four every week for the next seven years, but British pig producers lack confidence and are "rather poor buyers", Hugh Crabtree, managing director of Farmex told a meeting of the East Anglian Pig Advisers' Association in Suffolk.
In real terms the price of housing — typically £1,750 per crate place in the farrowing house and £185 per pig place for finishing — had come down. However, the measure of housing costs should not be cost per place, cost per square metre, cost per year or even cost per kg produced, but return on investment.
"This is poorly understood by producers so they end up simply wanting to get the cost per pig place down without considering whether or not the investment really works or represents value for money," said Mr Crabtree.
He called for more standardisation within pig buildings. The industry has no professional layer for building design, as this is expected to be provided by the builder. Those housing specialists that remain in business do so on a design-and-build basis.
"What is missing is standardisation and volume throughput to get our already excellent structures globally cost-competitive," he declared.
Mr Crabtree said that the market required a blueprint for standard design in each segment, which was what The British Pig Project was all about. It was expected that the first blueprints would be available early in 2006.
Monitoring production and performance in housing — by automatically collecting data from a network of monitoring devices — would be a crucial component. The rewards could be as high as a 30 per cent improvement in productivity and could well enable the UK sector to lead the world in modern, information-based precision production management — and "put some pride back into UK pigs", said Mr Crabtree.
