VION opposes boar fattening
Meat company VION Food Group will not support boar fattening and does not see this as a serious alternative to the discredited castration of male piglets.
They would not engage in unnecessary risks, said VION Agriculture Director for Germany, Dr. Heinz Schweer, at the conference “Perspectives in pig farming”, organised by the farmers union of the state of Badem-Württemberg, Germany.
“VION currently does not slaughters boars and also none that have been vaccinated,” Schweer made clear.
If German discounters were to decide to only purchase pork from females, this would split the market into three segments: pork from boars, females and barrows.
This should be avoided in any case, Schweer said, because such segmentation definitely not would lead to any price improvement.
Hans Jörg Schrade of the State Institute for Pig breeding (LSZ) in Boxberg pointed out that the issue of anaesthetics with castration of piglets has not been discussed for a while in public.
This was due to the global economic crisis that has overshadowed the issue, Schrade said.
Possible options to castration were boar fattening, the use only female animals through semen sexing or immunological castration of male animals with a vaccine.
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