What's a British pig, what's a British company?

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 21:36:18 -0000, "Pat Gardiner"
wrote:

Pat's Note: Here, tucked away is something of real interest to British
investigators of PMWS1999, CSF2000 and FMD2001, not to mention MRSAwhenever.

The industry is never too keen to mention that an uncounted and unknown
proportion of British pigs are not only not owned by the farmers who look
after them, but not even owned by Britons.

CSF and FMD compensation was going to non-British corporations in very large
chunks, leaving British farmers broke and needing charity.

Who is the patriot and friend of British farming now?

Some Canadians were very prominent too.

It was not just Lord Black that was skipping from capital to capital with
capital and capitalising on the situation.


http://www.thepigsite.com/swinenews/...ulling-program

...Numbers Missed the Mark
How was USDA so far off in its Dec. 1 inventory of market hogs? We don't
know the answer to that. Circovirus vaccine may have played a role, but we
need to remember that circovirus vaccine impacts the survival of pigs to
market weight, not the number of pigs born. So it should impact the number
of heavy-weight pigs that were in the market herd at any point in time, and
it doesn't appear that USDA got nearly enough of those counted in December.

Is there a structural change going on that would cause errors? Nothing like
the big shift of ownership and farm size of the 1990's is occurring today --
but there are more pigs coming from Canada to be fed in the United States,
and I think a growing proportion of those remain under Canadian ownership.

USDA ran into big trouble in the '80s and '90s when contract production
started putting pigs on farms not owned by the pig owner. The result was
double-counting. USDA's appropriate response was to quit worrying about
sites so much and be concerned with owners. Are they tracking down the
Canadian owners of these pigs?