By Bruce Cochrane.
The chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board says western Canada needs to produce larger numbers of hogs to help the processing plants in the region move closer to capacity and improve their competitiveness with plants in the United States.
The Saskatchewan Pork Development Board has been working to stimulate interest within the province in building new finishing barns to accommodate a growing demand among the processing plants in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan for slaughter hogs.
Sask Pork Chair Florian Possberg says, a combination of high grain prices, a very high Canadian dollar and disease challenges that all hit at once around 2007 brought new barn construction in western Canada to a halt.
Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
We saw a lot of barn construction in the late 90s early 2000s and that resulted in increased slaughter capacity at Brandon, potential at Red Deer as well as reopening the plant in Moose Jaw, Thunder Creek, and so our slaughter capacity has outstripped our supplies in western Canada where as in the U.S. they've continued to grow there.
In the Mid-west there's literally thousands of barns going up in the last number of years.
Their hog finishing capacity in the Mid-west has supplied plants there that have been running near full capacity.
Our plants are nowhere near capacity and so there is quite a need for additional hogs here in western Canada.
Possberg says things have really turned around within the swine industry and we see much more potential for profit in western Canada again.
He says we're starting to see interest in not only filling up existing space that had been empty but also in actually building new facilities in western Canada.
Source: Farmscape