It follows a formal complaint from the National Pig Association (NPA).
The claim, which was viewed hundreds of thousands of times before it was removed, was made on the Radical podcast with Amol Rajan by well-known farmer and author James Rebanks.
He said: "There are something like four or five pig farms in Britain producing 90% of our stuff, so 100,000 pigs is not a big farm anymore."
Questioned further by Mr Rajan, Mr Rebanks said ‘you are not in the game' unless you had 100,000 pigs as ‘you cannot buy food [...] and run wagons as cheap'.
"This is a huge industrial enterprise," he added.
Pig farming
After being contacted by pig farming representatives, Mr Rebanks acknowledged his mistake, insisting he ‘was not trying to denigrate pig farmers' or ‘mislead'.
He said: "I said ‘farms' and I meant ‘producer/processors' – the vague terms they use. I am sorry."
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NPA public affairs manager Tom Haynes pointed out that it was ‘simply erroneous to suggest there are any farms in the UK anywhere close to having 100,000 pigs on them'.
He added: "According to the most recently available Government data, the average size of a UK pig farm is 476. Even once you remove holdings of less than 10 pigs, it is still 938."
The complaint stressed that the pig and poultry sectors were both highly regulated, with farms that had 2,000 places for production pigs or 750 sow places requiring an environmental permit from the Environment Agency.
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