We are sure we can sell the extra pigs' Danish set for swelling herd Peter Crosskey Copenhagen While British pigmeat production falls as farmers respond to price weakness by culling breeding stock until the market recovers, the Danes are adopting a contrasting strategy. They reckon low prices are here to stay, and plan to restore the lost revenue by increasing output. Pig slaughterings in Denmark will be boosted by more than 10% to an annual rate of 25.5 million head over the next couple of years, according to Danske Slagterier. "We are comfortable with our estimate and we are sure we can sell the extra pigs on the world market as well," DS md Anne Birgitte Lundholt told The Grocer. Lundholt's confidence is clearly shared by many of the producers whose levies help finance DS. Results from last month's national pig census show only faint signs of contraction in the breeding herd, despite the Danish industry having experienced traumas similar to the UK market shakeout in the past couple of years and still suffering lower prices than in this country. Earlier census results in the Netherlands and recent surprisingly high clean pig slaughterings elsewhere on the continent have told roughly the same story of producers trying to maintain output rather than cut capacity in the traditional, cyclical reaction to price pressure. But the Danes are apparently taking this approach to its logical conclusion. They assume the world market is undergoing a structural shift to a permanently lower price level, and see the appropriate response as a search for economies of scale. Increased output could make this a self fulfilling prophesy. {{MEAT }}