News - Agriculture

The General Manager of Manitoba Pork says the combined effects of African Swine Fever and COVID, last year’s drought and now the invasion of Ukraine have created an almost perfect economic storm for pork producers.

Farm Credit Canada (FCC) is offering enhanced credit line options and increased crop input loan limits to address recent input cost increases in Canada’s agriculture and food industry.

The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center is encouraging farmers to identify and eliminate reservoirs of water where mosquitos can breed and hatch.

Farm Credit Canada is now accepting applications from registered charities and non-profit organizations in rural Canada for the FCC AgriSpirit Fund. The fund will award $1.5 million in funding this year. The application deadline is April 29, 2022 and FCC will announce the selected projects in September.

Buoyed by pent-up demand and higher prices, Canada’s food manufacturing industry performed well in 2021, according to the latest FCC Annual Food Report.

A partner with Polar Pork Farms suggests escalating tensions in eastern Europe have the potential to destabilize food production globally. Reduced feed grain production due to drought last summer in western Canada followed by problems with trucking made accessing feed grain this winter challenging and now the conflict in Ukraine is impacting global grain production.

A summer experience program offered by the Western College of Veterinary Medicine is helping expose veterinary students to working with swine.

Western College of Veterinary Medicine undergraduate students are once again being offered the opportunity to gain hands on summer experience working with swine.

Canada’s farmland values climbed in spite of impacts from pandemic supply chain disruptions and adverse weather that affected parts of the country, as Farm Credit Canada’s (FCC) Farmland Values Report showed an 8.3-per-cent national average increase in 2021.

The impact of COVID-19 and Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea on Manitoba’s pork sector has prompted the creation of a working to group to look for possible solutions.