MARCHIONESS BECOMES LATEST CRITIC IN THE ‘NOT SO PRIVATE LIFE OF PIGS’ FACTORY FARM PLANNING DISPUTE.
Tonight’s edition of BBC Television’s ‘Private Life of Pigs’ with Jimmy Doherty, will almost certainly present pigs as the incredibly intelligent, social and sentient creatures that like nothing more than to root in the soil, a bit of fresh air and freedom to move.
Putting the spotlight on pigs in this way is, however, poles apart from the reality of how the majority of Britain’s pigs are reared in the nation’s factory farms. In order to compete with cheap imports, UK pig farmers have been forced to intensify production. Dark windowless sheds, where thousands of pigs are crammed into barren, concrete pens or forced to lie on straw less plastic or metal slats, is typical of the short life a British factory farmed pig experiences. Their lives are indeed private, for many factory farmers do not welcome public visits.
Not content with cramming 10,000 pigs onto a factory farm, a new US style, super sized factory farm is seeking planning permission to produce 50,000 pigs a year in South Derbyshire, which if successful will be Britain’s biggest factory pig farm.
The farm’s proposed greenfield site at Foston is adjacent to both a women’s prison and a number of residents. Whilst the prison authorities have remained tight lipped on the proposal, residents certainly haven’t and not only have they organised several local actions but, with NGO support, they have inundated the local council’s planning committee with letters of objection, successfully delaying judgement day for perhaps a few more months.
The latest opponent to voice her opposition to the proposal is the Marchioness of Worcester – aristocrat, filmmaker, supporter of sustainable farming and fierce critic of factory farming.
Better known as Tracy Worcester, she produced the film Pig Business, which exposed the damaging consequences factory pig farming can have on the world.
Following several trips to Poland and the USA she is an eye witness to the horrors of factory pig farming on the pigs themselves and on local people. Whilst there she visited several small communities, just like Foston, which have been dwarfed by huge, new pig factory farm developments. In these communities she concluded that these super-sized farms were bad for small-scale farmers, polluting to the environment, harmful to human health and detrimental to animal welfare. The net result was people, animals and the planet suffering from this style of industrial farming.
Tracy and the team at Pig Business believe the Foston application is a factory farm too far and are opposing the application. Whilst the plans have incorporated some new improvements for animal welfare and the environment, overall the proposal remains a factory farm, where thousands of pigs will spend their entire lives in an indoor, artificial environment.
Of most concern for Pig Business, is what this project could mean for human health and local farmers.
Having that number of pigs housed on one place, will increase the level of disease on the holding and, over time, is likely to pose a threat to the local community at the very least. While it may be true that the diseases found would not themselves spread through the air, it has been shown that antibiotic resistant bacteria from intensive farms can be spread from ventilator outlets by air currents to people living several hundred meters away. They can also pass to people in cars (even with the windows shut) when they have to travel behind lorries transporting such animals to other farms or to abattoirs, along both country roads and motorways. Antibiotic diseases, like the pig strain of MRSA, is a growing problem in countries that have these vast pig factories. So far, only 4 cases have been reported in the UK.
The fact that such a large farm could replace a significant number of cheap imported pork products, could be a red herring. It’s probable that a farm of this size (supported by both direct and indirect subsidies) will simply have a competitive advantage over most existing UK pig farms. As opposed to outcompeting Dutch, Danish, Polish or German producers, this system will create a fresh round of bankruptcies amongst pig farms, which just a few years ago would have themselves been considered large.
This would then create a situation where UK pig farmers will have to find a way of upgrading their farms to at least as big and mechanized as the one proposed in Foston.
Pig Business believes it’s vital these smaller farmers should be retained in the industry because some of them have the potential to change to free-range labour intensive systems, whereas enterprises of this scale never could.
The Marchioness of Worcester says,“Britain’s livestock farmers must resist the government, banks, supermarket and other corporate lobby’s rhetoric of green wash to super size their farms to US style operations. These aren’t farms, they are factories and whilst they can bring cheap food at the supermarket till, the costs of producing food in this manner are externalized on to the broader community, namely; the health of local farmers, residents and beyond, poor animal welfare, economic viability of small-scale farmers and local economies and a degraded environment.. Now the private lives of pigs have become public knowledge, so too must the plans for super sized pig factory farms”.