The chair of Manitoba Pork says addressing swine health issues and rebuilding Manitoba's swine production infrastructure will be among the provincial pork industry's main focuses is 2015.
2014 saw record profitability within the Canadian pork industry as live hog prices soared and feed costs fell.
Manitoba Pork chair Karl Kynoch says, while 2014 started out with the challenge of PED, Manitoba's pork producers have done an excellent job containing the virus and for those that didn't get the disease, 2014 was extremely profitable which went a long way toward recovering some of equity lost over the past few years.
Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork:
Going forward swine health is probably going to be number one.
Right now we're in the process of putting together a Western Swine Health Initiative which is going to take on a lot of roles.
Industry and government is going to work together on that.
CFIA will be involved in it, so going forward we want to do everything that we can to try to keep that under control and get very strong biosecurity in place.
We'll also be working with the Canadian Pork Council on that to try to connect it through with the eastern part of the provinces, as well as some of the east have some initiatives going on as well.
You need to know what's going on right across Canada so there's a lot of work under way right now just to get that health initiative going and see what we can do to try to fight off some of the diseases before they get into the barns so that'll probably be the main focus going forward on the health side.
We also need to rebuild some infrastructure going forward in 2015 so we are trying to work with government to figure out how we can achieve that and everybody can achieve their goals but we do need to start replacing some infrastructure and increase the hog numbers in Manitoba to supply the plants.
Kynoch says we've seen a huge dip in hog numbers as many producers have exited the business and at the same time haven't been able to build new barns.
He notes hog numbers dropped to their lowest level in mid-summer before starting to recover but we're still over a million hogs short of meeting the province's processing capacity.
Source: Farmscape