PHOTO: VINCENT TER BEEK
PHOTO: BRUNO SILVA
FARM VISIT ▶▶▶
Ho Chi Minh City is also into pigs
It’s not only commercial parties that are making Vietnam’s swine industry boom. Ho Chi Minh City is as well – and has invested in an entire integration of the size of 11,000 sows. Pig Progress took a look in a project that was started in 2016.
BY VINCENT TER BEEK, EDITOR, PIG PROGRESS T Profile
Name: Dr Tran Hong Hai (57), deputy director, Vissan pig farm Location: Binh Thuận province, Vietnam Farm: The still expanding farrow-to-finish facility will eventually consist of 11,000 sows; and will finish all pigs itself. Currently the farm is at about 20-21 pigs/sow/year. The farm’s 60 full time em- ployees live on-site and can go out of the farm premises for four days per month. The requirement is that relatives do not have backyard pigs to avoid the contamination risk. The Vissan Group also focuses on beef cattle breeds. In total, the company has 51 product showrooms in Ho Chi Minh City, and another eight in the remainder of the country.
he Vissan Group is a well-known meat brand in Vietnam, known for quality products. The integrator currently consists of three slaughterhouses all over the country, one near Hanoi, one near Da Nang in
the middle and a third near Ho Chi Minh City. The one in the south has its own swine production facility as well, where the two slaughterhouses in the middle and north just acquire pigs from contract farmers.
What is quite remarkable about the integration, is that the driving force behind it is Vietnam’s largest municipality: Ho Chi Minh City. That is related to the fact that the pig mar- ket in Vietnam is usually very volatile, leading to situations of strong oversupply as well as shortages and consequently, to strong differences in prices paid for pigs. At consumer lev- el, however, prices stay relatively flat. In an attempt to con- trol the volatility in the market, the city decided to embark on setting up the Vissan Group, as soon as changing legisla- tion in communist Vietnam made that possible in 2000. Over the years, the Vissan Group’s farm grew out to become a 4,000 sow farrow-to-finish farm in Binh Duong province. Now that is all about to change, as Vissan has an ambitious aim. Seeing that Thai agribusiness Charoen Pokphand is ex- panding strongly in southern Vietnam, Vissan also felt the need to grow. Therefore the Vissan Group formulated an aim: to control roughly 30% of the city’s total pork market by 2020. This applies to both fresh meat as well as packaged or frozen meat. Traditionally, a large part of the pork consumed in Viet- nam is bought at the wet market, for which pigs need to be slaughtered at midnight. That way, carcasses can be sold on the wet market as from early in the morning.
New facility in 2016 In order to be able to control and supply a large amount of pork to Ho Chi Minh City, the Vissan Group invested recently in a new, large-scale project in Binh Thuận province, about two hours’ drive east of the city. Its existing older farm will gradually be scaled down as it is close to residential areas – the new facility will take over a large part of the operations. Jointly, the two complexes will eventually be an 11,000 sow farrow-to-finish operation. The facility is located at the end of a straight, sandy road. The facility can be found on a long, slim strip of land, hence all farm buildings are located behind one another. At the time of the visit, there were 1,200 sows, 1,000 gilts and 200 grand- parent sows that had just been transported from the United States. In addition, there were about 10,000 grower and fin- isher pigs. A brand new slaughterhouse, which can deal with the expanded capacity, will complete the project in this year.
Sows and piglets The sows at the farm are a crossbreed of Landrace, Duroc and Yorkshire. They get vaccinated for Foot-and-Mouth Disease
20 ▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 34, No. 6, 2018
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