Spain: 32% of farms raise pigs as their main economic activity

July 17, 2020/ 333 Staff with information from MAPA.

31-Jul-2020 (5 years 10 months 8 days ago)

This past June, the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture published the sectorial data sheet of farms whose main economic activity came from pig production. (Categorized by their "Technical Economic Orientation" - OTE)

According to MAPA:

Of the 53,105 farms registered in the REGA (General Register of Livestock Holdings), 17,060 fall into this OTE (32.12%). The largest number is found in Catalonia, followed by Extremadura and Andalusia (Figure. 1).
The number of pigs on the farms under this OTE accounted for 90.6% of the total pig census, and it can therefore be concluded that it is one of the most specialized areas within the livestock sector (average of 79.1%), behind poultry and dairy cattle. The rest of the pig census is quite distributed over both other livestock and agricultural sectors, with the suckler cow OTE having the highest number of pigs (although it only represents 0.8% of the total census).
The average size of the farms is relatively large, with about 420.07 livestock units/holding (about 1,600 sows). However, the range of variation between the autonomous communities is wide - from 1,791 and 1,208 LU/farm in Murcia and Castile la Mancha to 9.76 and 18.5 LU/farm in Asturias or Cantabria.