Greg Meek has to catch his breath while he explains to urban reporters what it feels like to lose more than $30,000 a month on his hog farm.
The Acme, Alta., farmer is part of a group of 12 who decided to donate 100 hogs to the Calgary Interfaith Food Bank rather than sell them below the cost of production.
“We can’t afford to go broke feeding people,” he said before the cameras.
“We want to raise public awareness. Farmers are feeding them and farmers are in trouble,” he said.
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“We don’t want a handout. We just want to farm. We farm to put food on people’s plates. We want those people to be aware of what it’s taking to get that food to their plates. We can’t do it at the current price.”
Meek is the human face behind the market analysts’ talk about hog cycles and export opportunities that didn’t pan out because of a currency crisis thousands of kilometres away.
After being encouraged by his government to expand and seize the day, Meek tries to understand what happened to his livelihood in less than a year.
Pork prices remain high in grocery stores and he knows he’s not getting anywhere close to his fair share when bacon sells for $3.99 a pound.
His savings are gone and he doesn’t expect government handouts. He thinks he and his partner Yolanda Osmond can hang on for awhile, but he is convinced this crisis is going to turf out one third of Alberta’s hog farmers. They can’t make their expenses at 23 cents a pound and they can’t approach banks because they are already mortgaged over their heads.
Average cost of production for pork is 60 to 66 cents per pound.
The only solution is to give away the meat.
In the last two weeks Meek has called friends and persuaded them to provide enough hogs to make up 1,000 hampers each for the food banks in Red Deer and Calgary. Rocky Mountain House has also joined the campaign, which has been set up as a permanent program to allow pork donations to food banks. The concept is modeled after the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.
“A year from now if a farmer wants to donate hogs in this program, all the paperwork is in place to send it to the food bank of his choice,” said Meek.
The food banks are grateful because Calgary alone sends out 200 hampers daily. Additional food is delivered to about 80 different agencies like women’s shelters, soup kitchens and church lunch programs, said Heather Hargreaves, developmental co-ordinator at the food depot in southeast Calgary.
Fletcher’s Fine Foods of Red Deer has agreed to donate the processing, wrapping and boxing. The donations include bacon, summer sausage, ham, shoulder butts and black forest specialty ham.
