During the first lockdown, farmer Nick Francis was forced to load his pigs onto a lorry and sell them to a wholesaler for less than a third of their normal price. Francis needs to make at least £300 per animal to see a profit. In April, he was scraping barely £80.
With restaurants closed, however, he had no other option. “We can’t even get close to the cost of production if we’re forced to sell to a supermarket,” said Francis, whose farm is in Oxfordshire. “You can only keep feeding them for so long if you’re not going to sell them, so during the first lockdown we ended up with a whole glut of pigs.”
Francis, 38, is among the thousands of suppliers once again
