By Bruce Cochrane.
Manitoba's pork producers are hoping to have a clearer indication by summer of what changes the provincial government is prepared to consider in order to speed up the approval process for new hog barn construction.
It's estimated at least another million hogs per year are needed in Manitoba to replace production lost over the past decade and provide the numbers necessary to allow the processing plants to move closer to capacity.
Mike Teillet, the Manager of Sustainable Development Programs with Manitoba Pork, says there is considerable interest in building or expanding finishing hog capacity from existing producers and new producers including some who had existed the industry and are looking at returning.
Mike Teillet-Manitoba Pork:
The biggest challenge is simply the processes that they have to go through in order to get a barn built.
Right now it's taking on average probably nine or ten months or more to get through all of the processes. It is one of the things that is a real drag on people wanting to get into the hog business as well as people wanting to expand.
We've looked at a number of different things which we think can make the system work much much more smoothly and quickly and still at the same time protecting the environment and so on.
We're not looking at trying to get around environmental protections and that sort of thing.
We're just trying to make the system work more efficiently.
We've had a number of meetings with government people to go over some of the processes and try to suggest ways where we feel the system can be improved.
I believe we're getting a fairly positive feedback from the government but at this point we haven't seen anything as to what direction they're headed but we know they are looking at it very very closely.
Teillet hopes to have a clearer idea of what the provincial government has in mind by this summer.
Source: Farmscape