17/09/21 Pig processing crisis, potatoes, emotional wellbeing of livestock

Farming Today

• Episode: 17/09/21 Pig processing crisis, potatoes, emotional wellbeing of livestock
• Website: Farming Today
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj8q/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:13:34
• Published: 2021-09-17 07:00

Farmers warn that we are in danger of exporting our pig industry. Some producers fear they may have to cull their animals because they can't get them butchered, others are leaving the sector. They say that leaves the way open for cheap imports. Processors say hundreds of thousands of pigs are stuck on farms because there aren’t enough workers in abattoirs and processing plants. They blame a mixture of Brexit and Covid. How can you tell what a cow is feeling? Researchers from Scotland's Rural College have created an App to help measure the emotional wellbeing of livestock. Waitrose is now using it so that independent assessors can collect data on the emotional state of the livestock on the farms that supply the supermarket with everything from dairy to farmed salmon. We visit the Commonwealth Potato Collection, at the James Hutton Instituteon the outskirts of Dundee. It's a living library of some of the world's rarest potato species and breeders believe it could hold the key to solving some of the crop’s disease problems. Producer = Rebecca Rooney Presenter = Charlotte Smith