The Dark Side of Farming: help stop the introduction of a huge pig factory in Derbyshire
13 June 2011
FREE short film screening and debate, open to the public
23 June 2011, 7-9pm
Burton on Trent Town Hall, DE14 2EB
The Soil Association, the UK’s leading charity campaigning for planet-friendly food and farming, and the Pig Business film team, activists fighting for food from farms not factories, are opposing the 2,500 sow farm in Foston Derbyshire. Dominic West star of TV police drama The Wire is visiting the site to support the local opposition against a dramatic escalation of industrial pig farming in the UK. This event will bring attention to a film called The Dark Side of Factory Farming which is to be screened along with presentations on mega farms like Foston at Burton on Trent Town Hall on 23 June.
The public meeting is open to anyone interested in helping to stop the introduction of a proposed indoor pig factory in Foston, Derbyshire and those who want to find out more about the harmful impacts these kind of super-sized systems may have on human health, the environment, local communities and animal welfare.
A panel of experts will debate the issue of mega-farms and will answer questions from the floor:
• Peter Melchett, Soil Association Policy Director
• Linda Wardale, Involved in stopping a mega-dairy farm being approved in Lincolnshire
• Marchioness Tracy Worcester, ‘Pig Business’ Film Producer and Campaign Director
• Local activists from Derbyshire
Dominic West, star of TV police drama The Wire and anti mega-farm activist said:
“The Foston proposal signals a fundamental shift in British farming towards the US and EU system of giant corporate-owned factories confining thousands of pigs in buildings and feeding them antibiotics to keep them alive.
“Treating pigs as industrial production units on such an intensive level is not only shameful but also unsustainable. It is the antithesis of what people want the British countryside and farming to be and it poses a potential threat to human health and the environment, as outlined in the Soil Association's and The Environment Agency's objections to this development.”
Find out more about the Soil Association’s ‘Not in my banger’ campaign against a dramatic escalation of industrial pig farming in the UK.
Factory farmed pigs - the facts
• Roughly 9 million pigs are slaughtered every year in the UK - about 1.5% of UK pigs are organic.
• 98% of UK pigs are fattened (finished) in sheds. 93% of growing pigs and 60% of mother pigs in the UK are kept indoors.
• Approximately 80% of UK pigs have their tails cut off (bored and unhappy pigs shut up in sheds will bite the tails of the pigs they are confined with).
• Around 55% of sows in the UK give birth while confined in crates, which they remain in until their litter is weaned. At least 35% of pigs reared for meat in the UK are kept in barren systems without any straw bedding.
• The proposed pig farm in Foston will have 2,500 sows.
• The average size of large-scale intensive pig farms in the UK is around 500–900 sows. The average pig herd size for all farms in the UK is around 75 sows.
• Approximately 92% of pigs are kept on 1,400 pig farms and the rest on some 10,000 small holdings and smaller and mixed farms.
• The future of British pig farming may be about to change - and pigs will pay the price with their welfare if it does. Industrial-scale farms will feature huge numbers of animals, with little or no access to open fields.
Disease, injury and premature death
Our powerful scientific evidence shows that the incidence of a number of serious diseases, including salmonella, could increase when large numbers of pigs are kept together indoors.
Large scale intensive pig factories give reason to be concerned about the build up of antibiotic resistance genes in pigs and pork, local wildlife, soil and pig workers, and potentially everyone living locally to them, due to the frequent use of antibiotics in pig feed to control a wide range of conditions on intensive farms. Approximately half of all antibiotics in the UK are prescribed by vets (of which around 45% are used on farms and approximately 5% are given to pets). Approximately 60% of all antibiotics used on farms are given to pigs. All but one of these are the same as, or closely related to, medically important antibiotics used in human medicine.
Pigs belong outside
Industrialising British pig production will keep many more pigs out of fields and in factory farms. Not only does keeping them in sheds inhibit their natural behaviour, it also highlights the way in which our food and farming systems have become increasingly divorced from what nature intended.
Pigs are highly sociable creatures and prosper when living in small, stable groups. They thrive on contact with each other and have a complex language of grunts and squeaks, which scientists say they can interpret. Scientists have even detected regional variations in pigs’ grunts. They sleep together huddled in nests and greet other pigs by rubbing noses much in the way we would shake hands. Pigs are highly co-operative in social groups and show affection by grooming each other. Pigs are the most intelligent of farm animals, and tests have been carried out that prove that pigs can be trained to do more than dogs.
Organic pigs
Soil Association organic pigs spend all or almost all of their lives out of doors, never have their tails cut off, and are free to root and dig in the soil. Organic mother pigs (sows) are never confined in metal crates or on bare concrete floors when they give birth.
Organic pigs live completely different lives from non-organic pigs, but as a result they cost more to rear. Organic pigs always have lots of room to move about, and are moved regularly to clean ground so they can dig and root in fresh earth - they need lots of space compared to a shed, and moving the pigs and their mobile houses around takes more labour. Piglets stay with their mothers longer, which gives the piglets greater natural vitality and causes them and their mothers less stress, but the mothers have longer between litters, and produce fewer piglets each year as a result.
Organic pigs eat organically grown crops which use no chemicals, but cost more, and unlike almost all non-organic pigs, they have no GM crops in their diet. Because they are able to run around and root, organic pigs take longer to get fat, and often organic farmers use slower growing (better tasting) traditional breeds that live longer (costing more to feed) before they are killed.
About Pig Business
Pig Business follows Tracy Worcester, a mother and campaigner, as she confronts the giant pig meat corporations that sweep across the world undermining rural communities, human health, the environment and animal welfare. Her journey reveals how factory pig farming was developed in the USA and has been taken to Eastern Europe where the pork, often produced below legal animal welfare standards, forces smaller independent traditional farmers to get giant or get out of pig farming. It explains how consumers can buy meat raised to high animal welfare standards from local producers at a fair price.
The Pig Business team supports campaigns against factory farms across the world and they have made a new short video highlighting the dangers of the introduction of new so called ‘animal friendly’ mega farms like Foston into the UK:
www.pigbusiness.co.uk