9 - The Declining Enterprises: Pigs and Poultry

Summary

This chapter is about both pigs and poultry. From a twenty-first-century perspective, it may not make much sense to write about two separate industries in the same chapter, but until about the 1970s they were often bracketed together. The second edition of Dexter and Barber’s classic book on farm management put them into the same chapter but also caught the end of the era:

Both pigs and poultry are moving into the hands of specialist producers. A few hundred poultry kept on the general farm is becoming a thing of the past … in general, large-scale units are necessary to make use of the technical know-how required for successful egg production. Pig production has not yet become so specialised. Pigs are still found as a subsidiary enterprise on many farms, and there are few, if any, of the enormous empires commonly associated with commercial egg and poultry production.

What brought them together in the first place was that they could both be kept on small areas of land and be fed either on the by-products of the farm or on purchased feeds. They were also often the first casualties of specialisation in the 1960s and ‘70s. As mixed farms began to specialise in grassland or arable enterprises, pigs and poultry were found to require more labour and capital than they warranted. As pig and poultry producers specialised, they were able to produce at prices that left little profit for mixed farms. What follows in this chapter is a more detailed account of the evolution of these two intensive livestock enterprises in the United Kingdom in general and south-west England in particular since the beginning of the Second World War.

Pig Keeping in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s

There were 4.4 million pigs in the UK in 1939, supplying 82 per cent of the nation’s pork consumption but only 37 per cent of its bacon and ham. The latter dominated the imported pigmeat market, with most imported supplies originating in Denmark and the Netherlands, and the UK was the major world importer of pigmeat. By 1947, the pig population had declined to 1.6 million, pork had virtually disappeared from the market, and bacon production had more than halved.