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Ruben van Boekel’s home farm, where he works with his parents three days a week, has 500 sows and 1,500 finishers.
“We have an oversupply in the EU market of between 110% and 115% self-sufficiency,” said the part-time pig farmer, who also works as an agricultural journalist for Agrio Uitgeverij. “The challenge is to have a low-cost price and to add value to create more value for the actual products.”
When he started working as a journalist in 2007, he said there were 8,000 pig farmers in Holland; that number has almost halved now.
The farm sizes “are getting bigger, because the number of sows and number of fattening pigs has a quota, so that number will always be the same,” said Boekel. In the Netherlands, you must buy shares from another pig farmer if you want to increase your numbers. “We have three different regions. If you are a farmer in region one, you can’t buy shares from a farmer in region two or region three.”
The Netherlands has 1.2m sows and a total of 12m pigs, giving them 8% of total European pork production. They wean an average of 28 to 29 piglets per sow per year. According to Boekel, this is thanks to genetics, feed, knowledge and climate, because it is a productivity indicator they have focused on for many years.
“Our strength was always that we have a very low cost price and could compete with the rest of the world,” said Boekel, who is focusing on adding value to pigmeat produce for his Nuffield scholarship. “In the last few years, we have had a lot of welfare regulations, so our cost price is rising every year. We can’t compete anymore with Germany, Denmark or Spain because of all the regulations.”
The Irish system uses margin over feed to calculate the cost of producing a pig. But in the Netherlands they have two cost price indicators.
“We have a cost price which includes everything and then you have cost price per pig and per delivered piglet,” said Boekel. “We have specialised farmers; you have the sow farmer and then the slaughter farmers. So we work with two cost prices. The first is per piglet delivered at 25kg, depending on the farm. And then the second is cost per kilo of deadweight for the fatteners.”
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