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A major crisis is coming to a head on pig farms up and down the country.
It’s a crisis that farmers warned us about, and now it’s happening.
Their worst nightmares are coming to pass; the mass culling of healthy animals because there simply aren’t enough butchers to process them and get them off farms.
The culling is likely much worse than the numbers being officially reported to the industry body, with fear, shame and sadness preventing many from speaking openly about the reality.
Thousands of healthy pigs are almost certainly being killed every week at the moment – possibly tens of thousands. These animals are not destined for the food chain but are killed just to make space on farms.
Some farmers are even turning to carrying out abortions on pigs; a fractionally less traumatic way to deal with the brutal and traumatic crisis of a backlog of animals.
It all amounts to the largest culling of healthy pigs in the history of British farming. So how did we get here?
The crisis is fundamentally rooted in the current labour shortage.
It’s hit the meat processing industry particularly hard, a sector that has traditionally relied heavily on migrant labour.
A combination of changing immigration rules related to Brexit and many workers choosing to go home during the pandemic and not returning, has left the sector 15-20% down on the staff it needs.
Not only has the sector struggled to recruit new workers from the domestic population, but butchers are also highly skilled and can’t be trained up overnight.
Thousands of pigs are being culled because of a shortage of labour
It all means that since the early autumn the meat processors have been routinely taking…
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Source : skynews
