Just a decade ago, the sun seemed to be setting on family hog farms and rising on large networks of investor and corporate owned hog barns.
However, with Big Sky Farms entering bankruptcy protection, mixed family farms no longer seem so outdated.
And if profitability returns to prairie hog production, mixed family farms may inherit the industry, their marketing agents think.
“We’re looking for brighter days. We don’t know when they’re coming, but we’re looking,” said Western Hog Exchange general manager Mack Rennie. “Everything goes in cycles. It was thought that the only players who would be able to play the game were the big ones – the Big Skies, the Puratones, the Stomps – they were going to be the only ones left, and look what’s happened to (some of) them.”
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Big Sky Farms is in bankruptcy protection, the Stomp venture failed and many hog-only production systems that set up in the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s have been taken over by others or shut down.
Thousands of small farmers have also left the industry, leaving each of the three prairie provinces with only a few dozen significant producers.
However, those dozens include many family operations and Hutterite colonies that may be larger than farms of the pre-1990s but are similarly family-operated and diversified across crops and livestock.
“The notion of a family farm is an abstract thing these days,” said Perry Mohr, general manager of Manitoba Pork Marketing Co-op.
A family may now operate the type of hog barn that in the mid-1990s would have been described as a “huge corporate operation,” Mohr said, but that doesn’t stop it being a family farm. Nor does the fact that Hutterite colonies are home to a number of families stop those farms from being a form of family farm.
The continuing threads that tie together the new and old family farms are the commitment to survive in farming and the dedication to diversify. Unlike the specialized, investor-based hog networks, family farms are hedged across a number of commodities and willing to hunker down for the long term.
“Somebody that is a land-based, mixed farmer has the ability to go through something like we’ve gone through for the past three years to a much greater degree than a corporate farm,” said Mohr, who predicted more corporate networks on the Prairies will struggle with insolvency.
Rennie said he thinks the hog-only, investor-owned systems are probably in much greater financial stress than mixed family farms because of recent years of profitable crop prices. As well, investors won’t just keep financing a money-losing business.
Family farms are still going broke and few view the future with optimism, but he suspects the mixed family farm will still be standing on the other end of this long tunnel of losses and turmoil.
Hutterite colonies, especially, have stuck to their strategy of diversification and have proven it is a viable economic strategy.
“They’re well diversified and very well run,” Rennie said. “They’ve got a little chicken, a little hog, a little cattle and some crop land. They don’t put all their eggs in one basket.”
