A Benefit Cost Analysis of Entire Male Pig Immuno-castration

Consumers of fresh pork have long been aware of the risk of their pork purchases not meeting eating expectations due to unpleasant taste or smell or other unsatisfactory quality characteristics such as a lack of tenderness. Boar taint, or the risk of it, is one of the most important factors identified in surveys of consumers of pork as being responsible for having a poor eating experience. Immuno-castration (IC) of entire male pigs is one method of reducing boar taint in pork. Currently about 60 per cent of male pork produced in Australia is immune-castrated. The question asked here is whether it would be profitable for the industry if the remaining male slaughter pigs were immuno-castrated as well. The additional costs associated with IC include the costs of the vaccine, extra labour costs, and additional costs arising from abscesses at the injection site causing increased product downgrades and stoppages of the slaughter line for cleaning. A major benefit of IC for the pig industry is a reduction in consumers of pork enduring poor experiences from unpleasant taste or smell when they eat pork. Over time, reducing the occurrence, and the risk of occurrence, of having a less than satisfactory experience when consuming pork has the potential benefit of the industry avoiding losing customers, and even increasing demand for pork, above what it would be with the continuation of the current proportion of boar-tainted pork in the total national supply of pork. Over the next ten years, if national consumption of pork increases at the same trend of the past decade, the benefits from avoided annual losses of demand or from increases in demand by just 0.5 per cent of total annual national consumption of pork would cover the cost of the remainder of the industry adopting IC. This conclusion applies if IC was adopted fully and immediately and the cost was the lower of the range of possible cost estimates at $0.10/kg carcass weight. More realistically, if producers adopted IC more slowly and adoption of IC took five years, and the cost of using IC was $0.10/kg carcass weight, then avoiding or preventing a loss of 1.5 per cent in annual sales would mean the total benefits exceed the total costs of achieving this outcome. Such relatively small gains in sales or avoided losses of sales seem eminently achievable. The conclusion of the BCA is that an increased use of immuno-castration in Australia’s pig production system that reduces the prevalence and the risk of boar taint would have a high likelihood of delivering a net benefit to participants in the industry.