Analysis of Pig Farming Development Trends and Prospect Outlook
From 2012 to 2014, pig farming losses led to continuous exit (in 2015, 5 million smallholder households exited). From 2015 to 2016, governments at all levels “improved government governance capacity and continuously improved the atmospheric environment,” designated no-breeding zones and restricted-breeding zones, implemented forced demolition of pig farms in no-breeding zones, strictly prohibited expansion of pig housing scale in restricted-breeding zones, and pig and breeding sow inventory data hit historic lows and were still declining, with year-on-year declines of 5.5% and 7.9% respectively, and month-on-month declines of 1.8% and 0.6% respectively.
The trend of pig farming development is large-scale farming. Although pig farming in China is still currently dominated by smallholder farming, implementing large-scale farming is an inevitable trend in the development of the pig industry. As market competition intensifies and people's requirements for the quality of livestock products become higher and higher, decentralized raising by thousands of households is already difficult to adapt, while large-scale farming can not only increase economic benefits and the ability to resist market risks, but is also a necessary foundation for implementing standardized production and improving the quality of livestock products. First, adopting large-scale pig farming can reduce the purchase price of feed raw materials and lower farming costs. In addition, implementing self-breeding and self-raising in farming can ensure piglet quality and also greatly reduce the financial pressure of replenishing stock. From the perspective of safety and hygiene, large-scale farming is conducive to controlling animal diseases and establishing a public health epidemic prevention system, and is conducive to implementing strict standards for farming, hygiene and epidemic prevention, and environmental control, promoting improvement in product quality. Second, adopting large-scale pig farming is conducive to adopting advanced science and technology and improving the production efficiency and production level of farming. It is conducive to promoting linkage among all links of farming, processing, operation, and sales, further alleviating the contradiction between small production and the large market, improving the level of industrialized operation of the livestock industry, and advancing the strategic adjustment of the livestock industry structure.
Affected by the government's environmental protection policies, the pig market in 2016 will show a trend of stabilizing or rising slightly.