Stephen Thompson has been a pig farmer all his life.
But he says he's never seen a crisis like the one the industry is currently experiencing.
Like many farmers Stephen faces the heartbreaking prospect of culling and incinerating hundreds of healthy pigs, simply because there aren't enough butchers and abattoir workers to slaughter them.
The 60-year-old keeps around 2,000 pigs at Povey farm in the village of Norton on the outskirts of Sheffield.
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Every week he sends about 80 animals off for slaughter with the meat normally sold on to the major supermarkets and retailers.
But acute labour shortages in abattoirs brought on by Covid and Brexit have left Stephen, a fourth generation farmer, facing the gut-wrenching possibility of culling hundreds of animals.
He estimates having to do so will cost the farm £11,000 a week.
The father-of-three, who was one of dozens of pig farmers protesting outside the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester on Monday, said: "It's worse than foot and mouth.
"We were closed down in foot and mouth, but all the pressures from that were nothing like this. It gets to you. I'm not sleeping at night. I keep waking up and thinking about it.
"We've got no control over it, it's not our fault. It's the slaughterhouses that don't have the labour, but it's falling back on us.
"We have all the financial implications that go with it. We send 80 pigs a week to slaughter. If they don't go that will cost us £11,000 every week. The bank manager likes us and we own the farm, but we can't carry on like that.
"We're not a charity - the pigs keep us, we don't keep the pigs."
Farmers have warned that up to 120,000 pigs will have to be slaughtered and incinerated because they cannot go to the abattoir.
On Friday Rob Mutimer, the chair of the National Pig Association, said Britain was facing an 'acute welfare disaster' within a 'couple of weeks'.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: "We think our backlog is in the region of 100,000 to 120,000 as we stand today. And it is growing by around 12,000 a week.
"This is happening on pig farms all over the country; they are backed up and running out of space to keep animals."
Stephen says his sheds are currently full and if he's unable to send off his usual quota for slaughter the farm will have a 'serious problems'.
He said: "You don't have spare shed space because it costs you. You run the farm to be full.
"Pigs are pregnant. You can't stop and start. It has to go on."
The Prime Minister faced criticism after he appeared to be unaware of the problem while being questioned about the issue on BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday.
His initial response was to tell the presenter: "I hate to break it to you but I am afraid our food processing industry does involve the killing of a lot of animals. I think your viewers need to understand that."
When it was pointed out to him the whole problem was that they could not be sold for food and they would have to be disposed of on the farms, he accused the presenter of 'trying to obfuscate'.
He added: "The great hecatomb of pigs that you describe has not yet taken place, let’s see what happens."
Stephen called on the Government to lower visa requirements for foreign butchers in a short-term bid to plug the labour gap.
He said: "We'd like the Government to listen to us for start. Listening to Boris Johnson on the Andrew Mar show the other day - it was just a car crash.
"If they drop the requirement for butchers from the continent to speak English it would sorted.
"Most butchers meet the other visa requirements and they can be shown how to do the job, so speaking English isn't essential.
"But they (the Government) have this idealistic thing of taking control and not letting anybody in even if it damages us.
"In the long-term perhaps wages will have rise and prices will have to rise, but we also need more education to encourage younger people into the industry."
No 10 insisted the Government had been working with the meat processing industry for a 'significant period of time' to address concerns over the workforce.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: "We fully understand the challenges that the pig industry has faced in recent months because of the global pandemic, labour shortages and accessing CO2 supplies, and, obviously, the reduction in exports to the Chinese market, which I know has had an impact.
"Thanks to the expansion of the skilled worker route, butchers from overseas can now be sponsored, providing salary and language requirements are met, and we want to see employers make long-term investments in the UK domestic workforce as well, instead of purely relying on overseas labour, so we can build a high-wage, high-skilled economy."
He added: "We’ve been working with them (the industry) for a significant period of time and that’s why we have this skilled worker route which allows butchers from overseas to be sponsored and brought in.
"Obviously, we’ll continue to work with the sector during this time, you’ve seen we’ve got the time-limited visas for the poultry route, for example. So, we will take the necessary steps to mitigate against these global challenges that we’re seeing."
