At Hog Days in Brandon, MB recently Andrew Dickson, general manager of the Manitoba Pork Council, talked about several good things he expects to happen going forward 2020 as it pertains to the hog industry.
Dickson said the Canadian dollar hovering around 76 cents means, in terms of payment for hogs producers sell based on US formulas, gave some reasonable prices throughout the year.
“With some highs and lows in 2019, going into 2020, we see a similar picture and it looks as though you can lock in some profits for 2020. There is uncertainty because of what’s going to happen with China because they’re so short of pork. At some point they’re going to enter into the world meat industry and absorb a lot of meat exports. And we’re not sure how that’s all going to work out, but that’s what we see happening,” he said.
Producers with barns and facilities in the industry 30, 40, and 50 years and so the barn’s getting older and they’re starting to think, whether to replace those barns.
“When you want to borrow money, it’s good to have a cash flow that’s positive and shows that you can service the debt for the first two or three years, and you can bring a positive picture to your banker, your lending institution. And so we’ve got several producers looking at making significant investments back in their farm operations,” said Dickson. “We may not see a big expansion, but we’ll see new barns going up, and there’ll be some increase in numbers. The processing plant in Brandon definitely needs more pigs. The plant at Neepawa is receiving more pigs from their operations, so we’re going into a good year.”
With producers wanting to replace existing and ageing facilities, they still need to go through the permitting process, and Manitoba Pork is right at the front of that process.
“For example, there’s a proposal that’s having its conditional use hearing the first week of January. But that’s the result of a year’s work getting ready to that point. And we know there are three or four proposals that are working their way slowly through the system in terms of preparing themselves to go to council for starting the application process, the approval process for their barns,” said Dickson. “We do advise producers though, that the municipal approval process and the provincial approval process takes a significant amount of time, and it’s difficult to speed it up in any way. And it’s not that people are against developments, it’s just that there are certain procedures in place that takes time, and we have no choices in those matters at this moment in time.”
With China accepting pork from Canada since shutting that business down last June, Dickson said sales are starting to pick up again in providing products, different products to the Chinese market.

“I was in Japan about four weeks ago at a major event at the Canadian Embassy organized by Canadian Pork International with 400 people in the room, essentially Japanese pork buyers,” Dickson said. “The Japanese buyers are quite concerned that we would be capable of supplying the product. It wasn’t so much the price, realizing they will pay more, especially if the Chinese become major actors in the world market. But their biggest concern is that we continue to be reliable suppliers to them because they’ve built their business model on buying Canadian pork.”
As many international players have said, any pork that goes to China right now disappears into the bottomless black hole. First, the Chinese depend on pork for 80 per cent of their protein intake, and they eat more pork in a week than Canada produces in a year, that’s why.
As Jim Long, hog commentator said it is now a total food issue, not only a pork issue in China. •
— By Harry Siemens