Victory for Campaigners as Hogwood ‘Horror’ farm to Shut Down

Hogwood Farm – investigated four times by Viva! Campaigns, ditched by Tesco and stripped of Red Tractor accreditation – will shut down its pig farming operation for good in September 2026, with its own planning documents acknowledging that Viva!’s near decade-long campaign was a key reason the business became unviable.

• Hogwood Farm in Oxhill, Warwickshire, will shut down its pig farming operation from September 2026, explicitly citing pressure from vegan campaigning charity Viva!
• Viva! Campaigns conducted four undercover investigations at the farm between 2017 and 2019, exposing serious animal welfare violations each time
• The farm was dropped by Tesco and stripped of its Red Tractor accreditation in 2019 after Viva!’s hidden camera footage showed workers abusing pigs
• The story became the subject of multi-award-winning Netflix documentary HOGWOOD: a modern horror story, presented by Game of Thrones star Jerome Flynn
• Viva! founder and director Juliet Gellatley, who knelt beside a dying sow during the initial 2017 investigation, calls the closure a victory for every single person who “refused to accept the status quo”

Bristol, UK – 7 April 2026

Documents seen by Viva!, the UK’s leading vegan campaigning charity, confirm that the owner of Warwickshire’s notorious Hogwood Farm is finally shutting down his intensive pig farming operation for good.

Few farms in Britain have provoked such sustained public outrage as Hogwood. Since Viva! Campaigns first investigated the site in 2017, the farm has become a national symbol of the cruelty, neglect and industrialised suffering at the heart of factory pig farming.

From investigation to national headlines

Hogwood first came under scrutiny in 2017 after Viva! Campaigns investigators went undercover at the farm following a tip-off from a concerned worker. Four investigations between 2017 and 2019 captured extreme welfare violations on camera: multiple instances of live cannibalism, sick and dying pigs abandoned in gangways, the routine mutilation of piglets and severely overcrowded sheds. When Viva! Campaigns installed hidden cameras in 2019, footage of workers brutally hitting pigs with poles and sticks meant the industry could no longer turn a blind eye to the extreme suffering.

Hogwood Farm was, at the time, Red Tractor assured and supplying pork to Tesco. Following Viva!’s campaign, it was dropped as a Tesco supplier and stripped of its Red Tractor accreditation. The story made headlines across the UK and became the subject of the multi-award-winning Netflix documentary HOGWOOD: a modern horror story, presented by Game of Thrones star Jerome Flynn.

An end to the suffering

An official Planning Statement confirms that Hogwood’s intensive pig farming operations will be permanently shut down in September 2026, regardless of the outcome of the latest planning application to convert the site to housing. It explicitly references the impact of Viva!’s investigations and the owner’s subsequent failure to regain Red Tractor assured status, which led to serious difficulties selling pigs for slaughter and a significantly reduced price per kilo for their meat.

Juliet Gellatley, founder and director of Viva!, says: “In 2017, I knelt beside a dying sow on the filthy floor of one of Hogwood’s sheds and made her a promise – that we would not stop fighting for the pigs trapped in that horrific place. This news comes far too late for her and for the countless animals who suffered some of the worst welfare violations I’ve seen in three decades of investigations. But it means that no more pigs will suffer at Hogwood from September, and that matters enormously. This is what perseverance looks like. It’s undeniably a victory for the animals – one that belongs to every single person who stood outside those gates, shared our footage or simply refused to accept the status quo.”

The bigger picture

The Planning Statement notes that efforts to sell the Hogwood business to Cranswick, Pilgrims and Karro – which between them produce 80 per cent of pigs in the UK – were met with “strongly negative” reactions. Cranswick, which Hogwood once supplied, was itself the subject of multiple undercover investigations in 2025, exposing serious welfare violations at its own farms.

“What we found at Hogwood was not an anomaly,” says Gellatley. “It was a window into an industry that works very hard to keep the public from seeing what happens behind locked gates. When people do see it – whether they eat meat or not, whether they’d call themselves an activist or not – they’re appalled. And when they act on that strength of feeling, change follows. Hogwood’s closure is proof of that. It won’t be the last factory farm to be held accountable for its actions on our watch.”

ENDS

Notes for Editors

• Viva! is a registered charity (no. 1037486) and the UK’s leading vegan campaigning organisation.
• HOGWOOD: a modern horror story is available to stream on Netflix and YouTube
• Videos of Viva!’s investigations into Hogwood Farm can be watched here – 2017, 2017 (woodland bones discovery), 2018, 2019
• For further information about pig farming in the UK, visit – viva.org.uk/animals/pigs
• Previous planning applications to convert the Hogwood site to housing were rejected in August 2022 and September 2023.
  • Hogwood’s owner, alongside his son, will continue to retain and farm the site’s 73.6 hectares of arable land and woodland
  • The farm’s remaining breeding sows have already been slaughtered; the Planning Statement notes that the last remaining ‘fattening pigs’ will be sold by September 2026
• For assets, interview requests and further information, contact Rachael Simpson-Jones, PR manager at Viva! – rachael@viva.org.uk