Seanad Éireann debate -
Friday, 24 Jul 1942

Vol. 26 No. 23

Pigs and Bacon Commission—Motion.

Mr. Crosbie

I move:—

That in view of the reduction in the pig population, the Seanad is of opinion that the operations of the Pigs and Bacon Commission should be suspended during the period of the emergency.

In proposing this motion, I should like to assure the House and the Minister that in tabling the motion I was fully alive to the difficulties and pitfalls that beset the Minister and the Pigs and Bacon Commission in their endeavours to keep the pig and bacon industry alive at the present moment. I assure you, Sir, that this motion is not intended to be an attack on the principle of the Pigs and Bacon Commission, nor is it intended to be an attack on any of the personnel of that commission, nor an attack on the Minister, because I feel that the position which has arisen in the pigs and bacon industry cannot, in present circumstances, be laid at the door of either the Minister or the commission. However, I do feel that, while the temporary suspension of the functions of the Pigs and Bacon Commission may not by any means solve the problem which faces the Minister, it may be a helpful step. When, in 1935, this commission was set up, and implemented by a series of further Acts right up to 1940, the present circumstances— certainly as far back as 1935—could not have been foreseen, and I do feel that the terms of the commission and their regulations are too hide-bound; they are not sufficiently elastic to cope with those very desperate emergency conditions which exist at the present time. It is obviously quite clear that, no matter how we do it, we must find some means of keeping the pigs and bacon industry alive for the duration of the emergency. To say that we could keep it in a prosperous condition may be hoping for too much, but certainly, by combining our suggestions, we ought to be able to find some means by which this industry would be kept during the emergency on at least the same basis as a lot of our other industries, which, while they are not prospering, are at any rate managing to keep their heads above water, and, all going well, will be still in existence when the emergency ends.

This question is a national one, and, as far as I am concerned, it is also a local one, because the county I come from was at one time the biggest pig-producing area in Ireland. To demonstrate that, Sir, I may say that the Cork figures for killings in the year 1935 amounted to 4,000 per week. In 1939 they had dropped to about 2,000 per week, and recently, just before those prosecutions, they had dropped to 300 per week. As the Minister and the House are aware, some of those Cork factories are about to close down, and I, for one, can only view such a step with the very gravest concern. I will deal only with one factory—there are others involved— and I propose to read some extracts from a letter from Messrs. Lunham. Messrs. Lunham point out that their weekly quota of killings, the quota fixed by the commission, is 1,500, but owing to the stoppage of maize not more than 300 weekly have been handled by them for some time past. In February they were 53 per cent. short of their total quota, and they were 52 per cent. short in March. Owing to recent prosecutions, they secured only 48 pigs last week. During that week, they spent in wages alone £331 8s. 1d., which works out at £7 per pig. Their other expenditure, such as rent, rates, taxes, etc., will bring the amount to £800 or roughly £16 13s. per pig. The present quota demands an average weekly killing of 450 pigs, and it will, therefore, be realised that if they are able to obtain only 50 to 100 pigs weekly it will be impossible to keep open. I have no reason to believe that Messrs. Lunham are any exception to the rest of the Cork factories; I see by this morning's paper that the Cork Farmers' Union abattoir factory is also about to close.

I have also here some notes from the Secretary to the Cork Pig Buyers' Association, which may be of interest to the Minister and to the House. He says:

"For the past 14 or 15 months there was in County Cork a big body of pig breeders. They were what was known in Dublin as "speculative breeders", and for those months this trade had been on the increase, because the breeders found that they could sell their bonhams to people in the midlands and west of Ireland at fairly good prices. If the Pigs and Bacon Commission insists upon trying to get these pigs at fixed prices, they will put the people in the midlands and in the west out of pig production and pig rearing also. The result will be that pig breeding in the south will go out because there will be no demand for the bonhams. At present, we have the pigs and sows and the means of breeding, but this insistence by the commission will do away with a lot of them. The manure value of pigs, according to findings in Denmark when manure was only £2 a ton, was that the manure available from a single pig was worth £4 per annum. The present price of manure is much higher. The country is short of 500,000 pigs of its normal supplies, with the consequent very great manurial loss. This is a matter that should be taken into consideration if the increased tillage campaign is to be a success. The ideal solution for the present crux would be the complete abolition of the Pigs and Bacon Act and the Pigs and Bacon Commission; failing this, a minimum price for pigs and a maximum price for bacon, and free trade for all concerned in between."

I cannot find myself in agreement with the suggestion for the abolition of the Pigs and Bacon Act; otherwise, I think the remarks of the Secretary to the Cork Pig Buyers' Association are very enlightening.

I do say, however, that this problem will not be solved entirely through the adoption by the Minister of the suggestion contained in the resolution in my name, because I agree with what the Minister said in this House yesterday that the problem of pigs and bacon production is of necessity primarily a question of food, but we cannot overlook the fact that price also has a great deal to do with the problem, and would at least help to alleviate the position both of the pig breeder and the curer. Therefore, I make the suggestion that the Minister should, first of all, very carefully consider adopting the terms of this resolution, and suspending the operations of the commission for the period of the emergency. By that, I do not mean that the Minister should cease to exercise any control over the industry. I would suggest that he might try to experiment, at least for a short period, on fixing a minimum price for pigs and a maximum for bacon, and see if that would help the situation. It is the suggestion of the people in the trade, and their suggestions should not be lightly turned down.

I would also suggest to the Minister that in addition it is essential, if the pig and bacon industry is to be kept alive, that future plans should be laid for the production of feeding stuffs. Pigs mean barley, and barley means pigs, and I cannot too strongly suggest to the Minister that, when he has secured the wheat position, if necessary by compulsory wheat growing, he should then take every step to make barley growing a paying proposition for the Irish farmer. I think he would then cease to have the same amount of worry about the pigs and bacon industry.

Dr. Doyle

I beg formally to second the motion.

Mr. Parkinson

I should like to support the proposal made by Senator Crosbie, because I think it is very essential that we should not lose our pigs and bacon trade. Unfortunately, the big obstacle in the way of producing more pigs is the question of more food. Next year will be our fourth year of intensive cultivation of the land because of the emergency. Up to a point, our tillage land has had a sufficiency of potash in the soil to carry us through for the past few years, but, like a banking account on which cheques continue to be drawn, the land now lacks a sufficient supply of the essential manure to grow potatoes, which must, I assume, for the next few years be the main crop on which pigs will be fed. The main essential to be put into the land in order to ensure a reasonably good crop is potash. In a normal pre-war year our normal imports of potash fertilisers were the equivalent of 7,500 tons of K20, potassium oxide. This, of course, is now completely cut off, and we are left in the position that we will have to provide potash from our own resources. That can be done if sufficient money is spent on the collection of the seaweed which is found on all our coasts, particularly on the western coast, where for years the people have been collecting seaweed to be burned into kelp, from which we obtain our supply of iodine. We now have to take from that seaweed its potash content. If we devote enough attention to the matter, and pay a decent price to the farmers and labourers who will collect that seaweed and burn it, I think we will be able to get enough potash to carry us on each year during this emergency. On a conservative estimate we would get 4,000 tons of potash in the way I have mentioned.

Of course, if we could increase our cereal crops, we would then be in a position to allocate some portion of those crops for pig feeding, because potatoes by themselves are not the ideal food if we want to fatten the pigs quickly. We can only increase our corn crops by the use of phosphatic manure. County Clare is in the lucky position of having over a million tons of phosphate rock. That rock lies between Doolin to the west, and southwest of that it reaches as far as Kilfenora, a distance of nine miles.

The seam of phosphate rock is three feet thick, and it is the same thickness at Kilfenora as at Doolin, so we assume that it does not vary in thickness between those two points. In the last pre-war year we imported 60,000 tons of phosphatic rock, almost entirely from North Africa. The phosphate in Clare is very hard rock, and very insoluble. The insolubility is due mainly to the fact that it has 15 per cent. silica, one of the most insoluble of all metals. Our difficulty up to the present has been that in order to make the Clare superphosphate soluble you have to use with it sulphuric acid. The people who have tried to manufacture sulphuric acid from Irish barytes complain that it is not as nearly as feasible a proposition as to import sulphuric acid. In England the whole supply of sulphuric acid is used for war purposes, and none is available for the making of superphosphates. Luckily for us the Germans, who are in the same position as the English with regard to sulphuric acid, are now able to make their superphosphate without using any sulphuric acid. They have discovered a method by which they can separate the phosphoric acid by adding a fifty-fifty proportion of silica, which combines very easily with the calcium and frees the phosphoric acid. Luckily for us we have in Clare a huge supply of colloidal clay, which is 98 per cent. pure silica. To prepare the superphosphate the Germans now use simply the ordinary lime kilns. Of course, they have in Germany good supplies of coal, but we have good supplies of turf, and in our western counties one often sees the lime kilns operating with turf. We know that we can burn lime with anthracite coal and with anthracite-culm or anthracite slack.

Another point of great interest to anybody who thinks of development along these lines is that our four sugar factories have the newest and latest type of lime-kilns, where they make lime from limestone to clean the sugar. These factories are idle for at least six months of the year. They are all near to, or connected with, railways, so that the job of getting the rock from Clare and the colloidal clay from Cork is capable of solution. It is alleged that there is a very inferior content of phosphate in the Irish rock. An analysis of the North African rock, which we had been importing, shows that it has 59 per cent. of phosphate. Parts of the Clare rock that have been analysed show 47 per cent. of phosphate. That is the lowest it shows and, in the higher grades found at Doolin, it shows exactly the same amount of phosphate as the North African rock shows-59 per cent. The trouble is that there is 15 per cent. of silica in the Clare rock and there is none in the African rock. Hence, the better solubility while it is in the raw state of the African rock as against the Clare rock. The central European countries, as well as Germany, now get only superphosphate that is prepared by adding silica to the rock and burning it. The phosphates in Germany have a lower percentage of phosphate than either the North African or Clare product, but Germany is not on a starvation diet yet.

The last of the fertilisers I should like to talk about is the organic fertiliser, calcium cyanamide. I do not want to speak about ammonium sulphate. We could make that if our gas works were operating, but there is so little coal coming in that these works are practically closed down. The making of calcium cyanamide is quite simple compared with some of the things we may have to do. Calcium cyanamide is produced by direct addition of atmospheric nitrogen to hot calcium carbide. Two factories have for years, in a small way, been turning out calcium carbide at Askeaton and Collooney, so that it is possible for us to do in a big way what is being done in a small way if the Government put up the money and set a staff of technicians at work.

It may cost more than it used to cost to get the necessary materials in, but it is worth while to preserve the fertility of the land and keep our people from famine. This would put us in a position to supply our cattle, pigs and other animals with food, so that money would be coming into the country in such volume that everybody would be able to get a job and people who had to go to England to look for work could come back and be employed in this business—the production of fertilisers to carry on the intensive cultivation of the land. The raw materials required in production of carbide calcium are limestone, anthracite and electric power. The subsequent transformation of calcium carbide into cyanamide is relatively simple. Nothing has to be imported. It has for years been successfully worked in countries such as Germany, Sweden and the U.S.A. The machinery could easily be made here. That is how Sweden is able to get her surplus crops and that is how Germany derived her main nitrate supplies in the last war, not only for the land, but for munitions. I hope that the Seanad will take this matter seriously. Everything depends upon the production of grain, grass, cattle and pigs. Otherwise, I do not see how we shall get out of the mess we are in at present.

Mr. Cummins

I should like to support this motion. The decline of the pig population is alarming. It is one of the most serious things which have happened throughout the whole emergency. Cottiers who were accustomed to keeping pigs have now abandoned the raising of pigs, for the reason that they find it impossible to provide the food. Following the abandonment of pig fattening will come a scarcity of manures. Much of the manure available to small farmers and cottiers was the result of the keeping of pigs. That want is felt already. Those who have taken allotments know that it is almost impossible to get farmyard manure for the reasons I have assigned. When they do buy it, it is of a very inferior type and is sold at a high price. Eight shillings and 10/- per load has been paid for it in the county from which I come. It would take three or four loads of this manure to do one-eighth of an acre.

Where allotments have been cultivated for three or four years, there is now a decline in the productiveness of the soil and the quality of the crops is beginning to show deterioration. This makes it all the more necessary to maintain the pig population. There is a scarcity of manure, owing especially to the increased tillage campaign. Manure has to be carted two or three miles at a cost of 8/- per load at the place from which it is taken. A sum of 1/- or 2/- may have to be added for delivery, which puts it beyond the means of many people.

The suggestion which Senator Parkinson has made was put forward in this House even before the emergency. It was, however, passed over. One of the objections was that the rocks at Doolin, in County Clare, were so hard that they could not meet the demands of a big manure firm in Cork. Machinery could not be found to break up the rock into sufficiently small portions so as to permit of its being made soluble. At that time the machinery could have been obtained to help in this process. Merely partial help was necessary, as in the matter of digesting food. The machinery could have been got at that time, but nothing was done about it.

Senator Parkinson's statement is a remarkable one. If the materials which heretofore came from Africa and Chile—and, I think, from Central Europe—are available here, instant use should be made of them. I appreciate the difficulty in the matter of machinery and other ancillaries necessary to the production of phosphates, superphosphates and nitrogenous manures. The Minister talked about ploughing the clover crop into the soil, but you must grow your clover first, and that cannot be done without some kind of manure. If more fertilisers can be made available at present, it will increase the pig population and consequently increase the quantity of farmyard manure which would follow. The continued use of fertilisers will impoverish the soil, if a reasonable quantity of farmyard manure is not used as well.

Potatoes are used largely in the production of pigs in the early stages. If barley and other pig mixtures are available, and if they can be produced at an economic price, I believe they would be equally as good as the Indian meal on which we depended formerly in great measure. It would be optimistic to hope that phosphates and nitrogenous manures would be made available, but we have our own limestone, anthracite, turf and electric power, and while we have those in abundance, and as the machinery is simple, I suggest that the question of deposits of phosphates in County Clare should be taken up by the Government. I hope this will not be given the deaf ear, as was given to it some two or three years ago, when the matter was mentioned in this House, and nothing was done about it.

Mr. McEllin

In regard to the point expressed by Senator Cummins, in connection with the development of our own minerals, quite recently we passed legislation in this House to establish companies for the purpose of developing minerals. As far as I know, work has been going on intensively for a considerable time. We have succeeded to an extraordinary degree both in Clare and Cork in connection with the extraction of phosphates, and in the production of sulphuric acid in Wicklow. According to what I hear from one of those directly concerned in the running of the business, the beginning is slow, but the prospects ahead are very good, and a considerable amount of phosphates should be available in 1943. Whatever may be obtained in the future, the products obviously will be at an uneconomic price to the farmer, unless the State subsidises them. The couple of years of intensive tillage we have had so far will not seriously affect the productive capacity of the soil, for a number of years, at any rate, except where there has been highly concentrated production in the past. The soil will give sufficient food for the next couple of years, with the manures we have available at the moment, particularly farmyard manure. If the farmer would apply the average amount of farmyard manure he has to tillage alone, instead of applying it to meadow lands and things like that, as at present, it would go a long way towards maintaining his usual average of crops. Of course, that does not apply to the big farmer, who may have Ford tractors and a couple of hundred acres of wheat.

There was nothing that Senator Crosbie said in his argument which would justify the moving of this motion at all. As a matter of fact, everything in his argument would justify the continuance of the Pigs Commission and a more rigid control of the bacon business. There should be a minimum price for pigs and a maximum price for bacon.

Mr. Crosbie

That is what I suggested.

Mr. McEllin

That is exactly what the commission tried to do.

Mr. Crosbie

No, they are working between two maximum prices now.

Mr. McEllin

In any case, they are trying to maintain the balance between the consumer and the producer. Minor matters of detail are another question. I agree with Senator Crosbie that there should be a minimum price for pigs and a maximum price for bacon. I would go further and say that it would be right and proper for them to fix the maximum price for bacon on the basis of the most efficiently working bacon factory. When you argue the merits of costs in running an industry, you can work round costs to a most extraordinary degree, and you can prove that the best bacon in one case might cost half what it would in another. As in the case of every other job, the cheapest will survive. When the price of an article is fixed, the margin should be cut to the bone, under the present circumstances.

The main difficulty comes from the shortage of one particular commodity, and that is food for human use. It is the shortage of the loaf that is reacting back along the whole line and will continue to react while that shortage is there. I am sure Senators will agree with me when I say that one would much prefer to be short of bacon or a plate of porridge than to be short of a loaf of bread. It seems to have turned out to be the primary, staple food of the people.

So long as that is so, you are going to have a shortage of other things, and the Government, in their desire to ensure that the staple food of the people would be supplied, had to make it more profitable to the farmer to supply their wheat to the miller than to do anything else with it, which is only common sense. The result, however, was that its price has been considerably increased until, to-day, it is three or four times what it was pre-war, and the idea was to discourage the farmer from using the wheat for any other purpose than human food. The principle of the whole thing, at the moment, is based on the necessity to encourage the farmers to give the wheat to the millers, rather than to use it for animal feeding or do anything else with it.

If we had an increase in wheat growing, sufficient to give us 100 per cent. of our bread and flour supplies, the other things would automatically follow, and if you had more than 100 per cent., you would have the pollard and bran coming back off the flour and, after that, you would have the development of other cereals, such as oats and barley. I agree with Senator Crosbie that an encouraging price ought to be given to the farmers to induce them to produce more barley, after we have secured our supplies of wheat, but if the cash price that you would give to the farmer for his barley would make him more inclined to give the barley to Messrs. Guinness than to supply it to his pigs, then Senator Crosbie's object would be defeated. All these things are related to one another, and there has to be a coordination of costs and prices from the farmer's point of view. First of all, you have to look at the matter from the point of view of what is most suitable for the farmer and what will be best calculated to encourage him to do what the State wants him to do, and that is to put the wheat in the millers' hands and the barley into the pigs, and so on, and co-ordinate the prices and costs.

Then you will get what we all want to see, and I think the Government has made a very good start in that direction. As far as I know, I think that that is the principle they have been working on, in raising the price of wheat and reducing the price of pigs, so as to ensure that the millers will get all the wheat that is available in the country; and a further development along these lines, in correlating the prices of the different articles with one another, should enable us to arrive at a policy of self-sufficiency in relation to our whole agricultural output.

I suppose Senator Crosbie is not pushing his motion to a division, but it certainly has produced a very useful discussion. Personally, I do not think it would be right to upset the Pigs and Bacon Commission now. After all their work, they must by now have had a considerable amount of experience, and their advice, as a result of the work they have done, will be helpful, undoubtedly, in the future. Generally speaking, I have no very definite views on the matter, but I am perfectly satisfied in any case that the land will continue, and is capable of continuing for the next year or two at any rate, to maintain its fertility. A number of people, when they argue about the question of fertility and the question of crops and the shortage of manure, always forget that the elements—the sun and the rain and so on —often times have considerably more effect than the amount of manure put on the land. Rain, coming at the right time, or the heat of the sun coming on grain at the right time, at harvest time, and so on, always influences the value of the crop return from the soil—by 25 per cent. very often—and it is very questionable if the bit of phosphate that we could get from North Africa would have the same effect. All these things are inter-related and, personally, I do not think it is necessary for Senator Crosbie to push his motion to a division, but as I have said, I am glad to see that the motion has produced a very useful discussion.

Mr. Johnston

Coming from a county which has been noted for pig production for as long as I remember, I want to raise a few points in connection with that matter, and I hope to address myself to the actual terms of the motion, because I think that some of the other speakers were dealing with minerals and several other questions— very informative and useful, I am sure, but I do not think they have much relationship to the present motion, to suspend the operations of the Pigs and Bacon Commission during the emergency. I want to point out to the Minister at the outset that before the Pigs and Bacon Bill was introduced and became an Act, I submitted, in another place, very strong arguments to the Minister on behalf of the pig producers in County Monaghan. Now, the position, as we found it at that time—that may not have any relation to the present position, but I think it is leading up to it, and I am putting this forward lest we get back to that position again—was that there were pork markets in County Monaghan, and the pigs were brought dead to the market. They could not be taken home again and kept for a week or two, as somebody suggested in another connection, when there was not a good price.

The result was that the pig producers were left at the mercy of the pork buyers. Whenever there was a big pork market, the buyers met and consulted among themselves and came to an arrangement as to what they would give for the pork, and very often the price was 4/- and 5/-, and sometimes even 10/-, under the prices prevailing at the time. There were four of these markets—two in Castleblayney and Carrickmacross, and two in Ballybay and Monaghan. Two of these markets were held on one day, and two on another day, and it has happened in a few cases that where the markets were held on the same day, and even though there was a distance of only 10 or 12 miles between them, there would be a difference of 10/- and 12/- a cwt. in the prices paid by the pork buyers, by reason of the fact that there was a glutted market in one town and a small market in the other. Now, we had to get over that difficulty, and I impressed it on the Minister on a couple of occasions, in another place, and later on, when the Act was passed, the Pigs and Bacon Commission was set up as a governing body to deal with the price of pigs and bacon. It has worked fairly successfully in some cases and not in others, but I fear very much that, as a result of the insecurity with regard to prices that exists at the present time, the work of that commission, as it is being carried on at present, is driving some people out of pig production.

Now, as I said at the outset, I come from a county that is noted for pig production, and what I have been met with in County Monaghan, when discussing the question of pig production, the feeding of pigs, and so forth, is the question: "Where is the use in feeding pigs and buying bonhams at a very high price, in view of the scarcity and high cost of fuel and feeding stuffs at the present time, when, after we have got the pigs ready for sale, we do not know whether we will be able to get them marketed in reasonable time or not?" There is one drawback here, which I intended to mention on former occasions, but I suppose it is better late than never. Let us take the position that a farmer has three or four or half a dozen pigs almost ready for market. Under the quota system, the curing companies can take only a certain number of pigs monthly. If there is a good supply of pigs in the county the quota may be filled within the first couple of weeks. After that, a farmer who has pigs cannot get them taken at the factory, and has to keep them over until the following month. At that time they are possibly over weight to bring the highest price prevailing. He loses on them on that head, and, in addition, he has lost the cost of feeding them, so that in some cases he may lose as much as 10/- per cwt. on the pigs. I have known neighbours of my own go to Monaghan and almost beg the curing companies to take pigs from them. They have asked me to appeal for them. That has not happened so much recently. It is, however, one of the things that has tended to put farmers out of production.

Under the Pigs and Bacon Commission this kind of thing used to happen. It has not happened in recent times. They would announce in the newspapers that they were taking pigs at, say, Monaghan on a Tuesday. The farmers living between Monaghan and Castleblayney attended at Monaghan with the pigs, which were accepted there, and then sent to Cavan. On the following day the Castleblayney pigs were taken in at Castleblayney and railed to Monaghan. Would it not have been far better to have taken the Monaghan pigs in Monaghan, and have sent the Castleblayney pigs to Cavan? If that is not happening at the present time, there is something which is much worse so far as the farmers are concerned, and that is that prices are not stabilised. There is no security with regard to prices. The farmers in the County Monaghan are quite prepared to feed pigs, not possibly to the same extent as some years ago. The small farmers in the county would be quite prepared to do that if there was any security as regards prices. That point was advocated when the Pigs and Bacon Act was going through the Oireachtas. It was urged that farmers who bought or reared bonhams to feed them and make bacon pigs out of them should know the price they would get for them when they were ready for the market. That may not be possible. I agree that if, a fortnight in advance, it was announced that there was to be a reduction in prices, farmers would rush out their pigs, and that if there was to be an increase, farmers would hold on to their pigs in order to get it. I think it is not outside the scope or power of the commission to fix prices for, say, a period of two months. The price of cereals is fixed, and why not fix, three months in advance, the price to be paid for bacon pigs? I move the adjournment of the debate.

Debate adjourned, to be resumed later to-day.