The pig farming industry plays an important role in German stock farming. With the development over the past years, Germany has grown to become the undisputed market leader in swine production in Europe.
The basic styles of German pig farming are the moderated scale family farm production system which can manage 1000-2000 swine; and the large scale pig farming factory production system which can hold 5000-10000 swine.
In the development of German pig farming, to achieve high efficiency, there are three steps taken to work out this progress.
Firstly, combining scale production and scale management to win higher scale benefits; Secondly, to make the efficient utilization of the professional production resource, the pig farms have a team work of the general pig farms, commercial pig farms, and the farms with self-sufficient breeding and feeding; thirdly, promoting the standard and normative pig farming by employing automatic feeding techniques, computer-controlled ration-timing feeding and mechanized feces cleaning, etc. All these measures ensure stable and high-yield pig production.
If these driving factors mean the chances for thriving pig production in Germany, these factors have helped Germany with the leading position in the EU, but behind these remarkable dynamics, there are risks for the German pig farming industry.
Because of the low prices and bilateral veterinary negotiations between Germany and the importing countries and the comprehensive implementation of the Quality and Safety System, the German pig industry has an impressive export success. However, the growing exports comprise several risks. As Germany has to import large amounts of feed components, one risk is the volatility of the world market for these components. The second risk is the dependence on only a small number of importing countries outside the EU. The non-EU countries may not be able to reach self-sufficiency for pig production within a few years, it can be expected that the import volume will decrease considerably, which will have a strong impact on Germany’s pig industry. Risk three is the growing imports of live pigs, domestic production alone would not have been able to supply a sufficient number of pigs, particularly because of a decrease of the sow and piglets population.
So in the future development, Germany’s pig farming industry has many risks and problems to overcome.
