Maintaining a healthy pork industry in Alberta boils down to finding better ways for fewer and fewer farmers to fill the needs of more and more people, says the executive director of Alberta Pork.

Much of the discussion at the corporation’s Annual General Meeting on Nov. 30 was centred on issues facing the province’s producers: Finding a fair model for pricing hogs, keeping a tight check on disease and getting in front of issues such as taxation, activism, foreign trade negotiations and changes in consumer demands.

“There’s a lot of issues on our plate that we’re having to deal with . . . in order to feed people,” executive director Darcy Fitzgerald said during an interview in advance of the meeting.

Alberta Pork’s strategies are evolving as realities within the industry evolve, including the amalgamation of production into larger units, where fewer people are raising larger numbers of pigs, said Fitzgerald.

“Mostly, we’ll go back to talking about trying to do things differently as we move into the future. The world has changed a lot. We’re seeing (fewer) producers, but larger farms. We’re also seeing a need to look at, how do we find a stable price?”

Fitzgerald touched on Chair Frank Novak’s statement late in 2016 that the current pricing model, based on the cash price of hogs in the United States, is broken and neither relevant nor fair to Canadian producers.

It doesn’t make sense to base the price to Canadian producers on the U.S. cash price, which changes daily, when they’re raising hogs to sell offshore into markets where consumer expectations are much different than they are in North America, he said.

The time-worn and adversarial model, in which the packing companies profit at the producers’ peril – or vice versa – is no longer viable, said Fitzgerald. Alberta Pork therefore continues to push for a system in which packers and producers work together for mutual benefit.

There has been some shift in that direction with Canadian packers getting involved in hog production as well as a trend toward packers offering longer-term contracts with producers, thus providing the stability they need to plan for the future.

“I do think that adversarial model is still there for the majority of the industry. I just think we need to get away from that,” said Fitzgerald.

Novak’s concerns expressed last year about the number of live hogs being shipped south for finishing are still relevant, and based on each producer’s need to make decisions that will be most profitable.

“I think there’s a move to try to build more finishing space (in Alberta), it’s slowly coming. As an individual who’s going to make that investment for the next 20 years, you have to be able to look at it and say, ‘I feel comfortable doing this business of working in the pig industry, that I can make a return and stay in my family and pay my bills’.”

“That’s any business decision. Without seeing the positives, you really can’t make that investment.”

Fitzgerald said the number of hogs produced in Alberta has remained stable over the last year, with most capital investment being put into renovations of existing facilities, in part to meet new standards set out in the Code of Practice.

The challenge being put to the industry is to find a way for producers and packers to take advantage of opportunities before them as countries that are not self-sufficient in protein production look to net exporters like Canada to fulfill their needs, said Fitzgerald.

“We have the best product in the world. It certainly is in high demand, we certainly do sell into some of the best marketplaces in the world and I do think we have great opportunity in the future. It just takes us as an industry to not be adversaries – to work together and to actually come to agreement on how we could be better at what we do.”

Fitzgerald said the corporation continues to play a strong role in checking the spread of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) and has been working closely with sister corporations in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

By the middle of November, the number of farms affected in Manitoba had stabilized and there were no reports of outbreaks in Saskatchewan or Alberta – but the need for vigilance remains.

“So far, we’ve been very lucky and we want to stay that way,” said Fitzgerald.

For the most part, everyone in the industry has been taking the necessary precautions as much as possible, but people do get tired and a burned out from having to continually deal with the same issue, he said.

“If we can just incorporate those protocols into the day-to-day routine, they suddenly don’t become so burdensome. The one thing we have to watch is regulatory issues.”

Fitzgerald cited the problems regarding specific regulations placed on washing and disinfecting trucks returning from the U.S. as an example.

Alberta Pork continues to work with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on that specific regulation and continues to talk with people to show ways they can improve bio-security to keep infectious diseases under wraps.

One of the speakers invited to the meeting addressed the risks posed by activists entering swine facilities. Details from that session will be included in the February issue of Prairie Hog Country.

Evolution within Alberta Pork includes changes in staffing to provide more resources for producers, including farm visits.

“We’ve really made a fundamental shift in how Alberta Pork will work, and we’ve put a lot more resources into staff and moving that staff to work on-farm with our producers,” said Fitzgerald.

Office staff has been built up as well, to work with producers and answer their issues one-on-one, he said.

The corporation continues a move announced previously where resources that had been used to help retailer’s market pork have been shifted to community engagement, such as providing product and support to charitable projects including Ronald McDonald House.

“We’ve made a rather large shift from what we used to do in more traditional marketing, where we worked in the retail case doing things and spending a lot of money working with the retailer, who, quite frankly, really has the ability to do that on his own. We decided to take some of those dollars and put that more into . . . working with those who might need help with food-related issues,” said Fitzgerald.

“We’ve had families who have had to use Ronald McDonald House. We know of people who have children on the street and needed help. It makes us feel good and it creates a real benefit to the community.”

Watch the next issue of Prairie Hog Country for stories from the speakers who addressed the 2017 AGM. •

— By Brenda Kossowan