The president of h@ms’ Marketing Services reports while increased live hog prices have improved the profitability picture for Canada’s pork producers high feed costs continue to create challenges.
As a result of drought last year in the U.S. Midwest North American hog producers faced dramatic increases in the cost of feed grains, particularly corn and soybeans resulting in dramatic losses.
h@ms’ Marketing Services present Brad Rodgers, on hand yesterday in Headingly for the official opening of the organization’s new head office, says right now producers are doing better.
At this point the producers are doing not too bad because the prices have gone up.
They’re still facing a lot of challenges with the feed grains.
The feed grains are very expensive.
At one point the producer was losing over 30 dollars a pig from any of the plants and now it is above that now that we are making a little bit of money.
One of the things that we’re noticing in our region is that at one time barley was a crop that was grown a lot in Manitoba.
Because of the price of soybeans being so high and corn being so high a lot of the barley acres are completely disappearing.
Farmers aren’t growing those crops anymore.
That’s becoming more of a challenge for us because Maple Leaf mandates that we have to have a certain amount of barley in our rations and so it’s getting harder and harder to find barley and at a reasonable cost.
Rodgers notes h@ms used to represent a lot of family farms and colonies especially in southeastern Manitoba but, as a result of the dramatic economic changes within the hog industry, a lot of producers have gone out of business.
He says h@ms currently represents about 290 producers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the bulk of those being colonies.
