The Manitoba Pork Council will probably recommend that farmers stop building dry sow stalls in construction or barn renovation projects.
The financial risk to farmers in building a system that could eventually be banned or restricted by future regulations is too great, said the general manager of the farmer organization.
“We may not get into specific designs (of open housing systems), but it’s probably going to end up somewhere along the lines of encouraging people to look at alternatives,” said Andrew Dickson.
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At the annual meeting of the Manitoba chapter of the Canadian Association of Farm Advisors, Dickson said the Manitoba industry would be the first major hog farmer group to tackle the issue.
“We’re going to lead Canada,” said Dickson.
Campaigns against placing pregnant sows in stalls have been conducted in Europe, the United States and overseas.
Australian Pork Limited recently announced it was adopting a voluntary phase-out of gestation stalls by 2017. The European Union has banned gestation stalls in new hog barns and is ending the practice in existing barns.
Activist groups like the Humane Society of the United States, the Winnipeg Humane Society and Animals’ Angels have been running anti sow stall campaigns for years.
The Winnipeg Humane Society wants the Manitoba government to ban stalls and supports “conversion funding” to help farmers move to open housing systems.
“It is clear that Manitobans want food that has been raised using humane and sustainable methods,” said Winnipeg Humane Society chief executive officer Bill McDonald.
“This isn’t a passing phase. Farming practices are changing all over the world to meet the humane standards people are asking for.”
Manitoba Pork has been funding research at the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Livestock and the Environment studying differing systems of open housing.
University of Manitoba researchers, and a handful of other North American researchers, have been studying open housing for more than a decade.
Dickson said many producers have already decided they won’t build new gestating sow stalls because the risk is too great.
“None of them would build the current system of dry sow crates today if they were building a new barn,” he said.
