No, I won’t sell pigs for £10 each
30 10 2007
After weeks of negotiating and gentle selling, I thought we had buyers for all nine of the Berkshire weaners that we’re selling, with the new owners collecting them on Saturday, 10 November.
Needless to say, I was wrong.
I had a buyer telephone me today. He had previously agreed to take three gilts off us, which had been difficult to arrange but was achieved with the co-operation of other buyers who adjusted their orders to suit.
The buyer initially tried to bargain us down but finally agreed to pay the £45 per pig that we were asking.
Bear in mind that these are good quality, birth-notified Berkshires from pedigree stock with amiable, easy going natures, that are easily handled, electric fence trained and capable of killing out ratios as high as 76 per cent.
Then the phone rang.
The buyer’s wife had found eight-week-old Tamworth weaners advertised in the local free ads paper for £10 each.
They were not birth notified, nor were they from animals registered in the herd book.
The buyer said that unless we dropped the price of our Berkshires to match the £10 Tamworths, then he’d buy the Tamworths because he could get four of them for less than one Berkshire.
I wonder if he’d go into a BMW dealership and tell them to drop their price to match that of the dodgy used Ford down the road?
Or if he’d demand a top dog breeder sold a pedigree retriever from proven show and utility lines to match the dodgy lurcher being sold by a bloke in a pub?
I suspect not.
So why demand that we drop the price? Especially when he knew the price was more than fair as we do not include labour in our costs.
No, it was the usual combination of “trying it on” and a belief that food (or the sources of food) should be cheap.
I’ve written before about cheap food and pig pricing so I won’t go into those here, but the simple fact is that if you want quality animals with known provenance and proven results then you have to pay for birth-notified animals from registered livestock with good lines.
Unfortunately, people have come to expect that food must be cheap to be “good” and quality matters far less than quantity.
It does make me very annoyed, especially when people also try it on like this, so my answer on the phone was short and pithy - “p*** off”. I then hung up.
Now I just have to find some more buyers for three gilts.
We’ve now sold one of the weaner gilts (to a previous and reliable buyer), so we have two birth-notified Berkshire weaner gilts still to sell. Unless they’re going to someone who already has pigs, I’d prefer they went together as pigs do not do well on their own. Use the contact form to get in touch if you’re in Aberdeenshire and interested.
What a tosser! Your pigs are good quality and a good price. Hope you find another serious buyer soon.
You were right to get annoyed. You’ll find a buyer.
I expect the caller was a “hobby” farmer….mostly they are not interested in quality, just show….! I’ll bet their animals never see a vet or get their jabs.
Cheek of them!
When I was speaking to a sheep farmer friend of mine last year regarding your pigs he felt the price quoted was extremely reasonable for the quality of your pigs and the breed. He was considering buying and diversify into pig but decided not to in the end because of the extensive care needed to rear pigs and felt he could give that much time to them.
And I’ve now had a woman call about a buggy we’re selling. It’s a couple of years old, but well cared for, clean, has all the accessories and nothing is broken or ripped.
But she turned it down because it wasn’t a current model. Well, doh, almost all buggies sold in the classifieds will be previous models…
MLA, extensively reared, outdoor pigs don’t need as much care as some people think provided they’re only being finished, ie from weaning to slaughter.
They do need feeding twice a day, they do need a couple of further checks in passing each day, and they need top ups/replacement of bedding weekly, but most of the rest of their husbandry is down to forethought and continual good practice (eg good fencing, good housing, good rotation of land, good biosecurity, good feed, good siting of pens and housing etc).
The real effort comes when you’re breeding pigs with both adult animals and piglets to manage. More checks are needed, much more consideration must be given to housing which pigs where and when, and constant, active husbandry becomes vital.
Take last Saturday, for example. We went from having a pair of sows co-existing on a toleration basis to having a seriously injured sow and a stroppy sow who had to be separated NOW. And the injured one had to be treated NOW. And the vet had to be organised NOW.
We had other pig jobs that had to be done now, but the sow situation had to be identified fast (it was), responded to fast (it was) and solved fast (it was). But it also meant I missed breakfast until gone noon, it meant dropping many other priority jobs, and it meant spending cash we don’t really have.
But that’s the reality of breeding pigs. A few Saturdays before, we had the stepped on piglet. Now, we have boar that has to be kept away from a sow so she has time to regain condition before being served and put back in pig. And so it goes on.
Finishing pigs is much easier, which is why I try to persuade potential buyers of our weaners to try finishing pairs of pigs several times before thinking of moving up to breeding. It’s much, much more demanding.
Some people just want something for nothing. Frankly, you are better off without that type of person, because the chances are, if they actually only got 70% from the pig later on, instead of the hoped for 76%, then you can bet your bottom dollar they would be on the phone asking for a percentage refund.