Kerry pig farmer Shane McAuliffe is no stranger to pressure, having once spent an hour on RTÉ’s Liveline coolly defending the intensive industry, but the recent crisis facing the industry has touched a nerve.
“We’re in the eye of a hurricane and everything that could go wrong is going wrong. The increase in feed prices, factory staffing issues due to Covid and Brexit are all part of the current crisis. We’re losing €38 per pig on average every week,” Mr McAuliffe told The Irish Times.
“We don’t have enough staff in factories and lack slaughter capacity and we have a build-up of finished pigs.
“Our farms are bursting at the seams and the risk is that it will become an animal welfare issue.”
UK farmers are also experiencing staffing issues and thousands of pigs had to be euthanised on farms. Mr McAuliffe does not think Irish farms have reached that stage yet but he is concerned that farmers are at breaking point.
“Pigs should be finished at 110kg but now there are pigs at 130kg. At that weight they can break the actual kill line in the factory and because they’re overweight you get the sow price of 55c/kg instead of €1.40/kg, yet we need €1.85 to break even due to the increased costs. Another big worry next month is that we’ll have an extra bank holiday and lose a processing day.
“Farmers inseminated sows nine months ago, no one could have foretold the situation we were going to be in. Some farmers are talking about getting out but if they stop inseminating sows now, they’ll just be left with huge debts and no piglets to pay them off.”
The increase in imported feed for pig ration is also a problem and Mr McAuliffe points out that the country needs six million tonnes of grain every year to feed its livestock but only grows two million.
On the domestic side things aren't much better in Mr McAuliffe's view. Ireland is still importing pig meat despite the backlog of pigs on Irish farms.
“We’re being killed by below-cost selling,” he says firmly.
"And even though China are still our number one export market they're starting to drop off as their own production increases. The UK was previously our biggest market but that's dropped off a cliff because of Brexit.
He believes a short-term solution lies in granting an emergency aid package and tackling the staff shortage issues.