The community spread of COVID-19 in the Prairie Mountain Health Region since late July challenged the Manitoba, the Western Canadian, and even for that matter, the Eastern Canadian hog sectors in terms of processing capacity at the Maple Leaf Foods (MLF) plant in Brandon, MB. 
According to Andrew Dickson, general manager of Manitoba Pork, at the beginning of the pandemic in mid-March, MLF implemented superior workplace protocols to ensure staff safety at the Brandon plant. Manitoba Public Health repeatedly affirmed that MLF’s measures are above and beyond public health recommendations and no need to close the plant.  
“Producers are extremely grateful to the individuals who continued to report for work every day and kept the plant operating,” said Dickson in a release.   
To address the recent capacity challenges, MLF reconfigured the plant’s processing flow and continued to maintain a high level of pig intake, including the start-up of Saturday shifts, with the balance shipped to other processing plants in Western Canada.  
“h@ms Marketing played a key role in making this all work. While the plant is still not at full processing capacity, it is on the right path to recovery over the next weeks,” he said. 
Bill Alford, general manager h@ms Marketing, said the COVID-19 virus outbreak in the Brandon community affected the Maple Leaf processing plant. The hog production cycle doesn’t stop for a pandemic because the hogs are market-ready. 
Maple Leaf sent workers home to self-isolate for at least two weeks, significantly impacting the plant’s processing capacity. It never did shut down, but it came to such a constrained point backing up the hogs.  

Alford and his team at h@ms Marketing sprang into action to ensure their members’ hogs found a processing home, and the hogs did not back up. While not sure if some of Maple Leaf’s integrated supplies got back up or not, h@ms Marketing found shackle space a couple of provinces over and within Manitoba to keep things moving without producers dealing with backed-up hogs on the farm.  
He said it helped to have good relationships with all the processors in western Canada and some in eastern Canada. It is a small industry in that regard.  
“Our h@ms team has the logistics and got underneath it and got ahead of it, kind of the motto and into this, not knowing if things would completely go offline. It’s a dig a hole and not create a mountain,” said Alford.  
He said the markets and prices went counter-seasonal with the pandemic hitting in the early spring, constraining the capacity and disrupting the supply chains. Typically, producers would see the highest prices in North America’s summer months but ended up with a bit of a rush to buy and a price surge in May. The prices never recovered to levels that turning on the barbecues causes in the summer. With herd liquidation, weanling prices fell off – no margins, no values. But, on the butcher hog side, just the total disruption sent the markets counter-seasonal. “Seemingly right now, we’re at some of the highest pricing since May, which you wouldn’t typically” he said. “Prices would soften heading into the fall with larger slaughter numbers coming down the pipe and seasonality in barbecues turning off.” 
h@ms team members indeed were busier with the logistics part, moving hogs out of province, but thank goodness it was temporary. Still, the situation could very quickly occur again at another processor. The virus didn’t go away, but its good time was on their side that the packing plants here were able to learn from the issues that hit the American processing sector back in the early spring and put in mitigating measures to limit the spread.  
“I credit our relationships with all the western Canadian Packers and out east, plus the Packers weren’t at full capacity,” said Alford. “The system had some slack and could absorb some of the surpluses but not enough slack if the Brandon plant had completely shut down.” 
Andrew Dickson said grain stores for a year or maybe two years if need be, but hogs 20 days. •
— By Harry Siemens