British pig farmers have started slaughtering healthy pigs due to insufficient slaughterhouse capacity, and some British dairy farmers have had to dump their milk because it is not being collected.
Approximately 600 pigs have been culled on farms across the country, according to Zoe Davies, director of the National Pigs Association, who said the culling had begun on a "handful" of farms.
Pig farmers have been warning for several weeks that staff shortages in slaughterhouses have led to a backlog of as many as 120,000 pigs that have to remain on farms where space is increasingly limited.
The meat industry is struggling with labor shortages as a result of the departure of foreign contract workers after Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic, while a shortage of delivery drivers and truckers has disrupted transport chains.
British dairy farmers had to destroy tens of thousands of kilos of milk last week due to a lack of truck transport. It is estimated that the transport sector currently faces a shortage of about 100,000 drivers.
A dairy farmer in central England had to destroy 40,000 kilos of milk over the past two months because there were no drivers to collect it. This is mainly because many truckers returned to the European continent after Brexit.
The United Kingdom produces 15.3 billion kilos of milk annually. Only one third of British dairy farmers have worked on a farm for five years or longer. Few Brits apply for farm jobs. As a result, 42.1 percent of dairy farms are still dependent on workers from the EU, according to a recent study by the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers.