High pork prices = rising pig stocks? - yes in Denmark, no in Germany - and the other EU countries? The series of EU livestock payments for the first half of 2017 provides initial results. The German census on May 3, 2017 showed a decrease of -0.2% in the total number of pigs. With 27.1 million pigs, the German stock is behind the Spanish pig numbers.The number of German sows fell significantly by -1.75% . The number of pigs reaches only 1.89 million animals. This means that German pig husbandry will not grow in the long term either. The already missing demand for the piglets is expected to be even larger at almost 20%. The possible compensation is largely compensated by ferry imports from Holland and Denmark. The latest stockpiling of pigs in Denmark on 1 July 2017 resulted in an increase of 1.25% to 12.46 million pigs as a whole. For fattening pigs, only 8.67 million animals or 0.6% more were counted.The Danish stock was increased by +1.5% to 1.02 million animals. This is Denmark's trend Intensified piglet production compared to fattening pigs. The background is the more favorable utilization of the scarce area. The additional numbers of animals can easily be accommodated in the neighboring deficit countries. In addition to Germany, Poland is one of the importers from Denmark. The latest pork census in Italy showed an increase of the total stock by +0.8%. Also in this piglet deficit, the number of sows was increased by 1.3% to 0.58 million animals.Livestock counts are continued in August in almost all EU Member States . It may be interesting to see to what extent the tendency to increase the population as a result of the favorable price of pigs will continue.
