Looking at a map of Manitoba, James Hofer of the Starlite Colony near Starbuck, Man., slowly counts the number of Hutterite communities affected by the moratorium on hog barn expansion.
It takes a while, but finally he arrives at a number: 46.
Hutterites have long raised hogs to support their communal lifestyles. With the end of the Crow Benefit transportation subsidy in the mid 1990s, that strategy became especially viable.
“With the chickens, layers, dairy and turkeys being supply managed, the colonies always looked first to hogs when starting up a new colony,” said Hofer.
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“What are we going to do now? That’s a real tough question. Some colonies are looking at manufacturing as an alternative, but that brings its own challenges with it.”
Agriculture has always been a strong part of the Hutterite culture, with religious communities of up to 90 people working together to raise food for their own use and to exchange for cash.
“We really pride ourselves in food production. We think that we are doing it in the best way possible. We love the animals that we work with,” he said.
“With agriculture, we could live right where we worked. Manufacturing tends to take you away from home more,” he said, adding that zoning changes to fit the new model might be a problem.
Cattle are one alternative, but colonies that have tried switching from hogs to beef found that it’s not a good fit. On a per-head basis, sows are much more productive, Hofer said, and are suited to the colonies’ competitive advantage: lots of helping hands for a labour intensive business.
Starlite Colony, which operates a 600 sow, farrow-to-finish operation, or any colony, won’t accept the $225 per sow buyout in exchange for emptying their barns for three years that was announced last week by the federal government.
The requirement that animals be destroyed and not used for human food runs contrary to their religious conviction that food must never be wasted, said Hofer.
“Some colonies are going to be in a major bind. The ones that have purchased land and were going to put up hog barns all of a sudden now find that not being an option.”
Starlite Colony recently bought a 400 sow property near Altona, with an older barn that it had planned to upgrade and expand.
“We’re in a fix right now.”
Existing operations unable to expand will have to become as efficient as possible, Hofer added.
Continuing might be difficult, however, because the cost of meeting heightened environmental regulations, such as Manitoba’s ban on winter manure spreading by 2013, would be “huge.”
Larger operations will find a way, but smaller family farm producers, typically with 200 sow units that have been in business for generations, may have no choice but to drop out, he said.
“The will to fight back isn’t there anymore. They’re throwing up their hands and they’re just giving up. The more farms we lose, the more people that are disconnected from agriculture. The gap between rural and urban people is just getting wider.”
Almost a week after the moratorium on expansion in the southeast, Red River Valley and the Interlake was announced, large-scale hog operators were still digesting details.
Hytek, one of the province’s largest operators, and No. 2 in Canada, is one of them.
“We’re still working through the document to fully understand it. It’s quite an extensive document,” said Denis Vielfaure, who along with his two brothers first went big with a 2,500-sow operation in 1994 near La Broquerie.
“There’s a lot of things in the mix. We’ve got a downturn in the hog market, right now we’re in the bottom of a cycle, foreign exchange and the effect of biofuels on grain prices, and now this report,” said Vielfaure.
Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch said that it would be the moratorium on hog expansion in all but southwestern part of the province, not the 48 recommendations by the Clean Environment Commission, that would deal the hog industry a crippling blow.
“There’s no scientific justification for the moratorium; it’s all about politics,” said Kynoch.
The cost of complying with the new regulations is difficult to measure, he said, adding that the pork council is still poring over the document’s 188 pages.
Extending the ban on manure spreading in winter to all operations and speeding up the imposition of soil phosphorus regulations to 2013, will mean that more manure storage will have to be built at a cost of $40,000 to $300,000 depending on the operation.
Smaller operators who are forbidden to expand will be hard pressed to justify the additional cost, he said.
Operations on the saturated east side of the province won’t pull up stakes and move west, said Kynoch, because the region suffers from spotty water supplies, sandy soil and reluctance on the part of many rural municipalities to approve large-scale hog operations.
The government’s $225 per sow offer for producers to exit the industry in exchange for emptying their barns for three years may prove irresistible to many smaller operators, he said.
“Especially since the moratorium, they might just take that and get out of the business,” said Kynoch. “The trouble is, a lot of these producers who have lost a lot of money aren’t going to be there when it turns around. Hogs have a history of being up and down.”
