'Your Al boar will potentially sire more than ten times the progeny that a natural service boar might produce and they'll be genetically better... so in reality you can afford to spend more than ten times the money on a good Al boar, and still be better off'. It looks as if UK pig producers are finally reaching the levels of Al (60-80 percent) that our European neighbours have been achieving for a number of years. This actually may be a result of the drop in sow numbers in UK, rather than as a result of a sudden leap of popularity in Al. But for sure new customers are taking up Al, as it is a fundamental means of reducing cost, improving quality and assisting biosecurity. There is a certain amount of educated guesswork in the figures, but we believe a total of about 1.6 million doses were sold last year, and we are assuming an 'average' sow population over the year of 550,000. At Rotech we know that we sold just over 510,000 single dose containers to UK farmers during the year. We estimate that afurther 70,000 containers were sold by other companies.
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