At the annual meeting of the Manitoba Pork Council, four men representing the hog in the midwestern U.S. told Manitoba hog producers it’s time to step up pig movement between the two countries.

While beneficial to hog producers in Manitoba to ship weanlings to producers in the U.S., and finished pigs to up and coming hog slaughtering plants in the U.S., it does nothing for the two processing plants in Manitoba already begging for finished pigs. While the Hylife Foods plant at Neepawa is running near capacity sourcing pigs from their own barns, that infrastructure is aging quicker than new barns coming on stream.

The Maple Leaf Foods plant at Brandon is running about three quarters full, with few extra hogs to see on the hog-finishing horizon. First the dilemma has to do with the fact if a Manitoba producer builds a new sow barn there is currently no new finisher space available here, therefore, the best option is heading south. Putting the shoe on the other foot, if a producer does get a permit to build a new finisher barn in Manitoba, no small feat, the U.S. dollar and new slaughter space in the U.S., begs for those hogs to go south.

Bill Tentinger, a pork producer in Iowa and past president of Iowa Pork Producers, says with the additional slaughter space coming online in the U.S., it is an opportune time to bring us all together, meaning hog producers on both sides of the border.

Tentinger says ten years ago, that the Canadian producer was proposing that they farrow the pigs and the American producers finish them in the mid-west where there’s plenty of grain. That didn’t work out too well because M-COOL, while not ruining that business plan, at least curtailed it.

“I continued to source pigs out of Canada and was able to get shackle space and stuff, but it added a little bit of hassle to marketing and stuff, but we were able to do it,” he said. “Now that M-COOL is rescinded and gone, it opens up that possibility once again. Now we have packing plants proposing to be built increasing our shackle space so why wouldn’t that be an opportune time to get that plan back together: To start creating new business relationships across the border that would facilitate those extra shackle spaces.”

With the new plants coming on stream, the smaller ones like Windom, MN, that Prime Pork plant would harvest more than 4,000 hogs daily, or about 1.5 million hogs annually at full production. Some of the largest packing plants, such as the JBS facility in Worthington, can process up to 20,000 hogs each day, says Tentinger. The Iowa pork producer says the one in Missouri is 3,000 hogs a day and both those plants are mostly tied up with independent producers going together to kill their own animals.

The one at Sioux City, Iowa would have the capacity to slaughter 10,000 to 12,000 hogs per day, or three million per year. The way he hears it, they will only be able to fill 30 to 35 per cent, the rest they will have to buy off the open market.

So that creates a demand for live animals out there that was not there before. They’re looking at 10,000 per day and they maybe will be looking at 5,000 to 6,000 head per day, sourcing someplace on the open market.

After talking to him, news comes that the council at Mason City, Iowa killed a processing plant. The family-owned Prestage Farms of North Carolina was proposing a $240 million pork processing plant that initially would process up to 10,000 pigs a day and eventually employ as many as 2,000 workers.

Tentinger says they too will need at least 25 to 30 per cent production to fill that plant and are actively campaigning to fill those spaces. “We may see some older plants shut down but not that many offline and will depend on how the economics work out for these packers. If they’re losing money in a plant, they will pull the plant off line, but if the hogs are there, they will keep it up.” Yet there is a concern of oversupply and are all those plants building with a market tied up, or just hoping to find new markets.

“Here’s the rub and concern, what will we do with the product going out the door,” said the Iowa pork producer. “So as an industry that is a big concern – are we able to market that product. We have all this extra kill space, where are we going to go with the product?” •

— By Harry Siemens