Hosts and participants hope that Banff Pork Seminar’s first virtual conference will also be its last.  
Normally held in Banff early in January, the 50th-annual conference was offered online, free of charge, on the mornings of January 5th and 7th. The online format was chosen early in the planning stages, when it became apparent that restrictions related to the Covid pandemic would prohibit large, indoor gatherings.  
From the standpoint of quality speakers and high-value presentations, the online conference has received great reviews from those interviewed by Prairie Hog Country.  
That same group is unanimous in stating that they look forward to attending a live conference in 2022.  
Bashaw-area producer Martin Waldner is a regular participant at Banff Pork, attending the conference as much for the social interaction and networking as for the learning opportunities it offers.  
This year, instead of mixing with fellow delegates and enjoying a soak in the hot tub, he found himself trying to work the online seminars into his daily routine – missing some to look after the barns or attend church, and then watching the recorded versions later on. The recordings were fine, he said, but there was no opportunity to ask questions as there would have been had he been able to watch them live. And the online conference meant no opportunity at all to connect with other participants outside of the presentations.  
Exhibitor Candace Ippolito from Alltech Canada, Alberta Pork Chair Brent Moen and Western Hog Exchange General Manager Brent Bushell echoed Waldner’s sentiments.  
Moen was able to attend only one of the plenaries, but said the quality was outstanding.  
“The medium it was delivered on was great, the questions, the graphics, were top notch. It was comparable to having the presentations done live and in person,” said Moen.  
Ippolito said her company – a Gold Level sponsor – got its money worth from the virtual conference. Ippolito said the online platform worked well, being easy to use and navigate.  
“It’s like any of those things. You want to support the industry; you have a message that’s bigger than yourself like we did . . . We continue to want to be recognized as a valued partner within the industry in good times and bad, so yes, that was completely accomplished in this process,” said Ippolito, based in Regina, SK.  
Bushell also stated that an in-person conference would have been preferred, but that was clearly not an option for the 2021 seminar. He said the additional expenses associated with sponsoring and attending a live conference can produce a huge payback.  
“You start to have discussions about the industry as a whole, and I find that’s where the greatest benefit is,” said Bushell.  
He offered an example of how supporting a live conference can pay his company back in spades.  
“Our average producer, let’s say he ships 10,000 head a year. During the Banff Pork (Seminar) . . . let me say I spend $3,000 there and during that time I get to speak to one producer who doesn’t know what WHE is, and during the course of our discussion they decide they’re going to market their hogs through the WHE next year and they ship 10,000 head and I get a dollar per head in service fees, that’s a pretty good investment.”  
Program co-chair Ruurd Zijlstra, who shares duties with fellow University of Alberta Professor Michael Dyck, said 50th-anniversary celebrations anticipated for 2021 have been postponed to 2022. How that will pan out has not been discussed much as organizers recover from this year’s event, said Zijlstra.  
However, he was pleased overall with the attendance, the presentation and the support from sponsors.  
This year, Banff Pork Seminar attracted more than 1,000 registrants altogether, with anywhere from 100 to 250 connected at any given time during the presentations. Zijlstra said attendance at some of the breakout sessions was actually stronger than during the morning plenary sessions, which featured Dalhousie University Sylvain Charlebois in a discussion of food trends on the first day and Joseph Kerns, president of Kerns and Associates, speaking about economics on the second day.  
Zijlstra said the conference was well supported by the 43 sponsors who provided a total of $110,000 to cover conference costs. Excess from this year’s income leaves enough cash in the kitty to get a good start on the 2022 version, which organizers hope will return to a live format at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel.  

“There is certainly something to be said for virtual meetings, but not for a meeting like BPS. It’s clearly not the preferred format, because we hold the meetings for two reasons: One of them is to educate people and the other is to network” said Zijlstra.  
This reporter on behalf of Prairie Hog Country logged in for both plenary sessions as well as two of the breakouts, the graduate student competition and the awards presentations.  
People love meat, but they also love value,
Sylvan Charlebois said in the opening plenary session on Tuesday, January 5th. He pointed out some trends that developed in 2020 as people spent more time at home, grocery shelves emptied and meat prices rose.  
“As you spook customers, they will just walk away. Once you ingrain this concept that meat is to expensive, that’s a dangerous zone,” he said.  
At the same time, costs started to drop on plant-based proteins and consumers started looking for new alternatives, including duck, bison, rabbit and elk.  
“Even horse meat went up. Bison is up 197 per cent.”  
With restaurants closed and price shock at the meat counter, people started scanning for different products, said Charlebois. In the midst of this, people have become more educated about preparing pork and are beginning to appreciate it as a quality product, he said.  
Charlebois closed his presentation with the following points:  
The value of local foods will be enhanced, which opens an opportunity for producers.  
The per capita consumption of beef is declining; another opportunity for pork producers.  
Economics of food will be rough in Canada for a while, but pork remains an affordable, accessible animal protein that people love and are getting to know better.  
Home delivery of meal kits is a growing trend. Partnering with grocers, restaurants and other partners will be key.  
In Alberta specifically, where the economy is not doing well, people are learning to think beyond oil and gas, which is an opportunity for the pork industry to lobby the government for additional support.  
Responding to questions from the floor (via moderated chat), Charlebois said food safety is not about science, but perception. There was a lot of irrational behaviour in the early days of the pandemic, of which some continues.  
“That challenge is that there is a lot of information out there that is confusing an already confused marketplace,” said Charlebois.  
“I believe food safety will be a challenge over the short term, but not necessarily over the long term.”  

Economist Joseph Kerns opened the second day’s discussion with an overview of economic factors affecting pork production and markets in the US.  
“We’re back to a new normal, if you will, but I believe it’s a normal we can live with,” said Kerns.  
He described trends in feed supplies, and then described the forces affecting hog markets in the US, including a statement that he has changed stance on the impact of inputs in the livestock industry.  
Kerns said he has been telling producers for the last five years that they don’t have to pay a lot of attention to inputs.  
“That song is changing, and we are going to have to change with it,” he said in his presentation.  
Two things happened in August that have created a perfect storm within the US hog market, said Kerns. First, there has been a marked shift in the corn supply and second is liquidation of sow herds. Those events have created a rally at the back end of the market, he said.  

Kerns said during the question and answer period that he anticipates a reduction in market weights in response to increased feed costs.  
“We’re going to continue to grow, and I think we’re going to continue to be our own worst enemy here,” said Kerns.  
“We’re running some record high weights right now. Packer-owned pigs last week were the heaviest that they’ve ever been in history. Once we come into summertime . . . we’re going to see diets that have to be revised, the parsing out of protein – I don’t care whether that’s wheat, canola or soy bean – it’s all going to roll together, so I do see them backing off in a pronounced fashion.”  
Turning to finishing space, Kerns said he doesn’t see much expansion except for the integrated operations.  
“Where is everything going to go? I think that will be an issue that plagues us . . . by the time we get to 2022,” he said.  

An annual highlight of Banff Pork Seminar is the presentation of the R.O. Ball Young Scientist Award and the Aherne Innovation Prize.  
Finalists in the R.O. Ball competition were invited to present their papers for the online audience during a breakout session on Tuesday, with the first and second-place winners to be awarded $500 and $250 respectively.

First place this year went to a return competitor, Mariia Tokareva from the University of Saskatchewan for her work on the impact of providing periodic exercise on the welfare of stall-housed gestating sows. Gilts and sows were separated into parity groups of zero to one, two to four and five to seven. Sows in the test group were taken out of their stalls periodically for a walk around the room. There were some differences in behaviour during the early stages of gestation, said Tokareva. But, by late stages, there was no marked difference in behaviour, nor did hair cortisol concentrations show any significant difference across the treatments.  
Second place was given to Joaquin Sanchez-Zannatta from the University of Alberta for his investigation into whether feeding barley instead of wheat could achieve similar growth performance in weaned pigs.  
In his presentation, Sanchez-Zannatta remarked that barley has lower net energy than wheat or corn, but is higher in fibre. Steam explosion can improve digestibility but may damage proteins. Ultimately, Sanchez-Zannatta said barley would have to be 10 to 15 per cent cheaper than wheat to be an effective replacement, he said.  
The Aherne Innovation Prize was awarded to a Quebec feed company employee who developed a wrist attachment that makes it easier to manage a pressure hose when cleaning barns. Martin Gosselin of Agri-Marche, speaking through an English translator, said in a video presentation that the spray gun trigger requires constant contraction, increasing the potential for forearm injuries and for accidents if the operator loses control of the gun. He developed a device attached to the wrist that allows the user to control the trigger at all times without straining a forearm or risking a shot of water to the face and also allows the operator to easily shut down the spray.  
The R.O. Ball and Aherne awards are named for two University of Alberta nutritionists who have played an integral role in the development and growth of Banff Pork Seminar, the late Francis Xavier Aherne, mentor to many of today’s top nutritionists and Ron Ball, who was program coordinator until his retirement from the university.  

Veterinarian Andria Jones-Bitton, epidemiologist, associate professor in the Department of Population Medicine and Director of Well-Being Programming at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, spoke about the detrimental impact of elevated levels of stress on Canadian farmers.  
A national survey performed in 2015 and 2016 Hagen found that 45 per cent of farmers were experiencing high stress.  
“There was a pervasive sense of lack of control, or being at the mercy of others. Participants described uncertainty as compounding stress and a negative impact on their mental health,” said Jones-Bitton.  
Respondents described the urge to honour and maintain the farm’s legacy, the sense of being tied to the farm, heavy workloads, long days and stress from having to put on a good show of strength in a small community as being some of the contributors to those stress levels.  
“Some participants described being scrutinized by the public, with a growing disconnect. One said the population is scared of their food . . . and there is frustration with activists around welfare, disease and production. (Respondents) felt that their entire way of life is being attacked.”  
Of all the commodity groups, pork producers were the ones who stood out as experiencing especially high levels of stress, said Jones-Bitton. The data did not show whether that response was endemic or if it was tied to the additional stress of dealing with entry of porcine epidemic diarrhea into Canadian farms, she said.

The group is gearing up for a second survey, which should help extrapolate some of those details.  
Jones-Bitton described a course of prevention, intervention and recovery to help producers manage crises and cope with stress, and then made some recommendations for helping people recognize and manage issues related to high stress and crisis.  
Industry and government must address occupational stress, while there is a need to implement penalties to those associated with illegal animal activism, she said.  
Jones-Bitton called on the farming community to advocate for addressing of occupational stressors where possible. She said mental health literacy training should be provided in agricultural communities and that individuals, communities, agricultural groups and government agencies are welcome to use the Emergency Response model developed at Guelph University. She called on delegates to support on-going research for farmer mental health in Canada.  

The discussion around farmers’ mental health was picked up by speaker Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, whose life took a new direction after nearly drowning following a car crash.  
Hanley-Dafoe said near the end of her presentation that her mother had told her she could do hard things. It became her maxim. On a dark night, during a dark period in her teenaged life, Hanley lost control of her car in a white-out, left the road and sank into a river. She had to break the window with her hands to get out of the car, and then exhale and follow the bubbles to figure out which way was up. She found her way out from underneath the ice and pulled herself into a shelf of ice in the river. She was found and rescued by man named Joseph Todd who was on his way home from work when he saw the tracks from her car leaving the road.  
“When I woke up in the hospital a while later, my mother was standing there, and she said to me, ‘Robbie, how did you survive that?’ And I looked at my mom, and I said, ‘Mom, you told me I could do hard things.’”  
She told the Banff Pork audience that what she learned that night is why she studies resiliency and why she studies the human condition.  
In her talk, Hanley-Dafoe spoke about the necessity of self care and psychological safety.  

She prescribed three practices to guide people in those concepts:  
1) Bookending your day, close with routing and ritual that welcomes rest and recovery and restoration.  
2) Day mapping, three columns. To do list, to be list, not to do list.  
3) Connect with nature. It is crucial to get time outside, every day. We feel a sense of abundance, problem solving improves … Nature is a gift. When we’re inside all day, we feel shortage and scarcity.  
She said there are core competencies or traits that resilient people lean into when things get challenging.  
1) Belong: it is crucial to have people in your corner to look out for you.  
2) Perspective aligns your head and your heart.  
3) Acceptance, in practice, means having learned to decipher controllables and align practices to put your energy where you can have influence.  
4) Choosing to be hope-filled, protecting morale and putting trust in the future.  
5) Humour is one of the first things abandoned, but lightheartedness and play are needed. “When you laugh, your body releases a natural tranquility, it gives you a moment to catch your breath.”  
Hanley-Dafoe went on to describe the barriers and facilitators affecting mental wellbeing. A little stress is motivating, but there is a threshold where increasing stress starts to have a negative impact, she said.  
Crying releases cortisol, which resets and recalibrates your system.  
Eating carbohydrates helps regulate your body at the end of a stressful day, so curling up with a slice of white bread can help mitigate stress so you can continue to show up for others, she said.  
She went on to describe other means that people can develop and preserve their own resiliency and be well positioned to help others when needed.  
Focusing on one task at a time minimizes distractions, while multi-tasking activates your threat response, she said. Taking care to transition from one role to the next, focusing on new habits rather than fixating on old habits and having an end point are all components of self care, she said.  
“Have an end point. Quit the mental chatter and decompress. Close the laptop and put it in a closet. Rest that role of being on call all the time. You cannot pour from an empty cup.”  
Recordings from all sessions are available on the website, banff.ca. •
— By Brenda Kossowan