Manitoba Pork anticipates construction of the first swine barn projects under a new provincial pilot program to begin next spring.
In April 2015 the Manitoba Government introduced the Pig Production Special Pilot Project Evaluation Protocol which ended a freeze on the approval of permits for the construction of new or expansion of existing swine barns in Manitoba.
Mike Teillet, the Manager of Sustainable Development Programs with Manitoba Pork, told those attending the organization’s Fall Meetings last week the first four applications under the pilot program are in the pipeline now.
In particular the Maple Leaf plant in Brandon and, to a lesser extent, the HyLife plant in Neepawa were experiencing shortfalls of pigs so the idea of the protocol was to allow us to build barns again and to make sure we could start resupplying the plants.
One of the things that’s happened, I think, is it takes people awhile to get their resources together. As you know building a new hog barn is not a simple thing. We’re talking an absolute minimum of a million dollars or more. You need to line up financing, you need to line up your contractors and engineers and all this sort of thing so it takes time. We weren’t expecting that we would get a whole flood of barn applications immediately.
At this point we’ve received four applications. Two of them are for new barns and two of them are for expansions of existing operations. None of them have been approved yet. They’re in various stages of the approval process. We don’t actually anticipate that we will have any of them built this year, probably starting next spring when they get their approval.
~ Mike Teillet, Manitoba Pork
Teillet says, at this point we’re probably a million pigs per year short of what is needed to bring the plants to full capacity.
