WAKING UP TO THE POSSIBILITIES OF WINNING IN PIG FARMING

A humble start with a few pigs owned by his father, a farm worker, did not stop Buti Malinga from pushing through difficult obstacles to get to where he is today. Today he is a small-scale commercial pig farmer who runs Vukani Piggery, supplying up to 130 baconers and porkers to the formal market every fortnight.

Buti’s vision is to become a large-scale commercial farmer in a couple of years. “Right now we are waiting for an environmental impact assessment [EIA] to come back before we expand our capacity to 600 sows,” he says. The EIA has been undertaken for a 2 500-sow unit, but his immediate plan is to build an additional 500-sow unit, increasing their capacity to more than 600 sows.

Buti says the challenges faced by small-scale producers in their efforts to commercialise their piggery units include acquiring good genetic material and modern facilities, high feed costs and a lack of adequate biosecurity measures. These are big hurdles to overcome, and it is no surprise that so