Officials with Manitoba Pork Council expect to release a new sustainable development strategy by late spring or early summer.
Manitoba’s pork producers began discussing the creation of a sustainable development strategy about 18 months ago and the document has been under development for the past year.
Manitoba Pork Council sustainable development programs manager Mike Teillet says the document will be about 100 pages and consist of four sections.
There’s a context section and background where we talk about hog farming and agriculture and so on, there’s a section on Manitoba Pork Council and its role and then there’s the actual commitments or the sustainability statements that we make and there are 100 of them and that’s sort of the last section of the document.
The sustainability statements are really commitments by the Manitoba Pork Council and by extension for Manitoba hog farmers to commit to certain practices over the short to medium and even in the long term in some cases.
The committments are in some cases very general.
We have ones that are quite general in the sense that they talk about we will not pollute the environment and that sort of thing which are very general statements but there are also very specific ones.
For example we will not locate any major hog operation within 1.5 kilometers of a town or a city or within one kilometer of a river and that sort of thing so there’s are some very specific commitments and there are some general ones.
Teillet says the document is intended as a general guideline over the next several years.
He expects the strategy to be released this spring or early summer.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
