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Lack of Construction Contractors Challenges Pork Industry

By Bruce Cochrane

The chair of Sask Pork says one of the biggest challenges facing the province's pork industry, as it works to meet the demand for hogs from western Canada's pork processors, will be attracting the expertise to build new production capacity.

As a result of reduced hog production, western Canada's pork processors have been scrambling to attract the numbers of hogs required to keep their plants operating at peak efficiency.

Saskatchewan Pork Development Board chair Florian Possberg says the industry requires a certain minimum level of production to remain viable.

Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
We went through a period between 2007 and 2008 and 2013 where the industry was really challenged in terms of profitability so any interest in new construction really disappeared.

Now at this point, we really don't have the infrastructure in place to develop new projects.

That's our biggest challenge, to overcome the inertia that we've got in terms of no new construction and really how we reinvigorate our industry so we can see new developments.

Any contractors we had back when barns were being built back 10 and 15 years ago obviously didn't sit on the sidelines waiting for us to want to build again.

They went off to into other parts of the construction industry or other business so, if we're gong to build new barns, we need to put back into place contractors and expertise to really get the job done so we do have a lot of work to do there to get things moving again.

Possberg acknowledges contraction costs continue to rise and the rules about how you construct things tend to become more sophisticated which also adds to costs so, compared to barns built 15 years ago, we're going to have substantially higher costs for any new construction today.

Source: Farmscape


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