An expert view of the porcine industry from the UK to Australia

After nearly 20 years as general manager of Minitube Australia, Alan Smith has retired and handed over the baton to his successor Dan Hollingworth. At home in England, where his parents had a 200-sow free-range piggery, Dan’s affiliation with pigs started at a young age. In 2010 he found himself on the way to Australia, taking up a management position on a 3,000-sow breeder unit in Western Qld. After living in Qld for almost 2 years, he was offered the opportunity to move to Victoria and run a 2,500-sow free-range piggery, which, over the next 6-years grew to a size of 5,000 sows across multiple sites.

“After 10 years with the business I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to join the Minitube team”, Dan stated. The protein market in Australia and New Zealand continues to enjoy record highs, bolstered by consumer confidence as normality returns to all our lives following a tough 2-years of COVID restrictions. 

With his background Dan is predestined to cover some of the main differences between pig farming in the UK and pig farming in Australia. Aside from the obvious climate differences there are some lesser-known differences that stand out when looking at farming in the two nations.

Australia has a closed-door policy to genetic or live animal imports, which understandable given the health status of the swine herd here, no FMD, no PRRS, no PED, no ASF and no PMWS, producers and the government want to keep it that way, however, that closed door policy has left Australia well behind other nations in terms of production. Two men were jailed in 2019 after being found guilty of illegally smuggling Danish pig semen into their Western Australian piggeries, the business fined half a million dollars and eventually liquidated, serving as a reminder that the Australian government are serious about this policy.  Subsequent tests confirmed that there were already Danish genetics in the herds and the illegal importations were tracked back to 2009. Fortunately, this did not expose Australia to PRRS (which was the main concern at the time).

Another difference between the two nations that again puts Australia behind is carcass weight, while the average carcass weight in Australia is growing slowly, we still lag a long way behind the UK and other overseas countries. 

The average UK carcass weighs in at 88.6 kg while the Australian carcass comes in 13.6 kg lighter at 75 kg. Carcass weights are less to do with genetics and more to do with consumer demand, the Aussie market demands a smaller, leaner pig. If this trend was to change and a larger carcass would be accepted in the market Aussie pig farmers would see an increase in revenue for very little outlay. 

But it's not the UK carcass weight that many Aussie pig farmers are chasing, what they really want is a world where the carcass weights seen in the USA are accepted here, dressing out at a huge 92 kg would generate some serious revenue, this final growth stage of the pig is the most profitable, finisher feed generally being the cheapest feed in the production system meaning those last few kilos are worth their weight in gold.

From a technology and technique standpoint the two countries are very similar, Dan was fortunate enough to work with a few UK companies to bring electronic feeders and general farm equipment to Australia, he was a part of a forward-thinking business who prided themselves on continuous improvement and never standing still, just as Minitube do.
An expert view of the porcine industry from the UK to Australia