04/01/2008 
Entrepreneurship and optimism help mastering any crisis - A comment by Franz Meyer zu Holte, ISN Chairman
Dear ISN members, Dear readers of www.schweine.net, At the beginning of 2007, an atmosphere of optimism spread among the pig keepers. In the course of the year, however, the pig keepers were caught by the realities of price-related pig production. While the whole world was full of admiration towards agriculture returning to value creation, and while global shortage provided the tillers first and then the dairy farmers with good revenues, we – the pig keepers (and the piglet producers above all) – were experiencing severe losses as a result of such shortage and of price increases.
As a matter of fact, the pig market always depends on supply and demand. All of us Europeans made the meat supply increase as a result of our euphoria, but demand within Europe and all over the world was not able to keep pace. High-priced feed as well as a weak dollar did their bit, too.
An end of this misery is not in sight. With our production units becoming ever lager, it will become ever harder and more painful to adjust the market. Being in such a situation, everybody hopes for others to close down their enterprises in order to have supply decrease and make prices become adequate again.
We are familiar with the situation; we know about how destructive such behaviour will be for capital.
But for all that, or even just because we have experienced that situation in the price-related pig production several times before, we also know that we will only be able to survive if we obey the conditions of optimum biological and operational results. Bearing this in mind, you will have the ability some day to replenish your account again.
Neither moaning nor lamentation will be helpful at all; we all know that we need to stay the course, to resort to reserves and maybe hold a reasonable conversation with the borrower’s bank. But if you may have planned to quit pig farming – for whatever reason – within a few years’ time, you should now carefully think about how long you would want to overstrain your capital.
Headlines catching the eye again and again over the past days and weeks read:
The farmers are back on track – we’re being someone again!. But even if that does not yet go for the pig keepers, you may say that entrepreneurship and optimism have always belonged together and still do, guaranteeing success to arrive some day, even if times seem to be hard to cope with until that day.
So, I wish for every one of us to be touched by a ray of hope, to be full of confidence and to face a little bit of luck in 2008.
Sincerely yours,
Franz Meyer zu Holte, ISN Chairman
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