NPA's "noise" in the media is an essential prelude to persuading retailers to pay producers a fair price now, Zoe Davies told an NPA regional meeting.
"We have been telling them there are thousands of sows coming out of production and asking them what they are going to do in nine months, when they can't find British product," she said.
"Their response tends to be, 'Well we can't see it happening yet. Everybody tells us it's all fine'.
"And then we have to try and explain about production cycles and that they should be paying farmers a fair price now, otherwise they are going to be paying a hell of a lot more in a few months.
"But getting that message across is exceptionally difficult," NPA's general manager told NPA's south-central region meeting at Newbury.
"So it is not just about talking to retailers. What we need to do is stimulate demand with consumers, and that is what our press releases have been about — making a noise that gets through to consumers, asking them to look out for the Red Tractor when they are buying their pork products.
"It's also been about why they should support British. Because they don't owe us anything and in many cases it does cost more to buy British."
Zoe Davies said NPA had been issuing press releases at a rate of around one a week since the beginning of August and these had generated over 71 different articles, 17 of which had been in national newspapers.
(These figures have more than doubled since she addressed the NPA Newbury meeting.)
Instead of just running the story once and then dropping it, some papers had made the NPA Save Our Bacon campaign into a running story.
"We've also done 23 radio interviews and the other day I did a CNN interview, and all off the back of five press releases.
"So we have made quite a lot of noise. Unlike the dairy industry we don't have thousands of farmers who can go off and start demonstrating so it is important that we can look at other ways to get through to consumers, to let them know that is is important that they support British pig farmers by looking for the Red Tractor."
She told the meeting that NPA was aware of 14,000 sows that had been taken out of production already, mainly from NPA membership "and we also know that sow culling has increased by an extra 7,000 sows a month, over the last two months".
So it was important, she told members, that NPA got its messages across that contraction of the national herd was something that was really happening and it was not just a case of pig farmers moaning about low prices. "People really are leaving the industry as we talk."
Above: Nottinghamshire producer Richard Blant explains to the television cameras why he has stopped serving sows on his high-welfare unit.
Meanwhile over on the continent slaughtering had dropped by two percent over the past eight weeks and that had led to a ten percent increase in the price of pigs.
"So when BPEX predicts a drop in slaughterings in 2013 of significantly more than two percent we can see what this potentially means, and this is the message we're trying to get to retailers."
The number of sows in the European breeding herd had dropped nearly four percent in the 12 months to May-June. Even the big hitters such as Germany, Holland and Denmark had seen drops in their sow herds, she said.
Some of the decline was due to the pending introduction of the partial stalls ban in January 2013, but some was also due to chronic poor returns due to high feed costs, which had now gone much higher still.
"It's not just happening in Britain. It's happening everywhere. It's a global problem."
It was essential that NPA continued talking to retailers "even though we might not feel that we're getting anywhere", said Zoe Davies.
"We have spoken to all of the major retailers and some of them we will be meeting again. They are engaging with us. They are talking to us.
"But the problem is that none of them wants to go first. They are all happy to put the price up but none of them wants to jump first because we are in a recession and they don't want to lose customers to their opposition."
NPA had been talking to retailers about supply chain contracts for a long time, she said, trying to make them understand that they needed dedicated supply chains if they wanted to continue supplying British product "which they tell us emphatically that they do, every time we meet them".