Canada resumes receiving pork from Smithfield Foods

Mar 17, 2025
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

The temporary suspension was related to offal shipments

Canada is once again accepting pork shipments from Smithfield Foods’ processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.

Canada suspended imports last week “following an issue with a limited number of certain offal shipments,” Smithfield said in a March 14 statement. “We are grateful to the USDA and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) for a quick resolution of this matter.”

Neither the USDA or CFIA provided any clarification online about what actually caused the suspension.

But the USDA identified that under Canadian policy, “three noncompliance issues within six months” results in a suspension, Reuters reported.

Smithfield’s facility in North Carolina is the world’s largest processing plant.

The plant has the capacity to process about 32,000 hogs each day.

The CFIA also has a new minister responsible for its work.

As the newly appointed minister of health, Kamal Khera assumes responsibility for the CFIA.

She served as the parliamentary secretary to the minister of health from 2015 to 2017.

From 2021 to 2023 the MP for Brampton West was the minister of seniors, and from 2023 to 2025 was the minister of diversity, inclusion and persons with disabilities.

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.