DES MOINES, Iowa – Competition was hot and smoky along the streets of the Iowa State Fairgrounds, as dozens of pork barbecuers bragged about their slow-cooked products.
All insisted theirs was the best, made with an old and secret recipe that was better than that of the competition.
Along the same streets and inside the buildings competition was more quiet but no less intense among the thousands of producers and suppliers attending the World Pork Expo.
No one criticized anyone else’s products, industry or pigs directly, but it wasn’t hard to find somebody who would say his nation’s pigs were the best.
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“British genetics are the highest, but Canadians won’t like hearing that,” said Chris Jackson of the British Pig Association, who was staffing a booth in the trade show.
“Our genetic base still leads the world.”
A couple of dozen metres away Jim Donaldson of the Canadian Swine Exporters Association was telling a different story.
“Canadian genetics have given producers around the world the best results,” said the president of Donaldson International Livestock Ltd. of Tavistock, Ont. “There are still a lot of places in the world that need our genetics.”
This show may be held in the middle of the American heartland, but Donaldson and Jackson weren’t focused on selling their pig genes to American producers. They were more interested in the hundreds of visitors from farther afield.
“There are a lot of visitors from Latin America and the Pacific Rim and that’s who we sell to,” said Donaldson. Already, in the first couple of hours of the expo, he had spoken to producers from South Korea, China, Venezuela, Japan and Mexico.
Jackson had spoken to visitors from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and China, “and a couple of Americans.”
The World Pork Expo draws thousands of people to the sweltering state fairgrounds each summer.
It is a giant trade show and promotional opportunity for suppliers and production systems to extol their virtues and fight for business in an industry that has seen massive change and consolidation in the past decade.
Much of the business of the pork world goes on casually, beside booths, on benches and in the beer tents across the fairgrounds.
Canadians are omnipresent, as are the tents, booths, signs and officials of the National Pork Producers Council.
This is the American group that organizes the expo and the main force behind the recent countervailing and anti-dumping case against Canadian pigs.
But there was little ill will evident between producers and officials of the two nations, as everyone seemed to be back to business as usual.
La Broquerie, Man., weanling exporter Claude Vielfaure, one of Canada’s biggest weanling suppliers to the Iowa hog industry, comes regularly to the expo with about 20 of his barn managers and staff.
“It’s a yearly bonding session for my guys,” said Vielfaure as he wandered the aisles of the trade show, meeting business partners and competitors.
“It’s the time of the year when all the people come together. It’s a great meeting place to get things done.”
His company, Hytek, has never set up a booth, preferring to stay low-key and casual.
“We just walk the aisles and set up meetings,” said Vielfaure.
Some Canadians attending the show say they aren’t looking to do business, just trying to keep abreast of developments in the fast-evolving industry.
“I come here to learn. I come here to see the new ideas,” said Quebec hog producer Raymond Breton.
“Here you have a lot of answers for different questions. When you are a farmer you need information and you need results.”
He and a group of Quebec producers were in a jocular mood on the first day of the expo.
“These are the image of good producers,” said Breton, with a big smile, about his half dozen colleagues.
They then cheerily wandered off to a day of hog production seminars, but not before he mentioned to a Western Producer reporter from Manitoba that “Quebec is still No. 1 for pig production in Canada, you know.”
