Manitoba Pork Council is hoping to complete a producer survey launched in February within the next few weeks.
In February Manitoba Pork Council launched a survey intended to gather information on the state of the hog industry in the province to be used in dealings with government and to gather registration information on behalf of Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives in order for them to issue premises ID numbers.
Manitoba Pork Council Industry Services Manager Arne Thorlacius notes, in terms of the registration for premises ID, producers are being asked to provide contact information, legal land descriptions, the numbers and capacities of barns on the site and the types of animals on the site.
I would say that we’re over 90 percent complete.
Right now I have about 48 sites that I haven’t got information for and of those sites I would suspect some of them are actually producers who have gone out of production.
The thing is that I actually do need to speak with producers to make sure that I know where there are hog barns in the province even if they are out of production because they have to be registered if they have the capability of having hogs raised in them.
Just in case the barn is ever brought back into production some time in the future, we just need to know where it is.
So even if the producer is out of production we’d appreciate it if they’d help us fill out the information for where they are and the size of the barn and that sort of thing.
The reason that they’re issuing premises ID numbers is that in the case of a disease emergency they need to know where all of the hog production premises in the province are so if there is ever a disease outbreak they know who would be within a circumference of a given location and who they need to warn and what might need to be quarantined and things like that.
Thorlacius says he had hoped to have survey completed by the end of this year but, he acknowledges, that might be pushing it.
He says he is trying to get this done as quickly as possible and he stresses all sites need to be registered even if they are out of hogs.
