Hog farming is profitable again. Herd expansion is about to begin, but environmental regulation might limit the opportunities in Manitoba.
Years of poor returns and losses forced the Canadian and American hog herds to contract.
Canada’s hog herd is now the smallest it has been since the late 1990s, just before the great expansion of the early 2000s.
The reduced supply and good pork demand from China, Japan, South Korea and Mexico pushed Chicago nearby hog futures to record levels in recent weeks.
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That doesn’t mean record profits for hog producers because feed grain prices are also near record highs.
But there is black ink on the industry’s ledgers, a welcome sight and cause for cautious optimism after years of red ink.
That optimism is tempered in Manitoba by the Save Lake Winnipeg Act, a recently passed law with the ambitious goal to reduce the phosphorus load to the lake by 50 percent to return to a pre-1990 state.
Lake Winnipeg is severely threatened by nutrient overload, which leads to algae blooms, oxygen depletion and dead zones in the water.
It is good that Manitoba’s government is confronting the problem but its overemphasis on the pollution caused by hog operations threatens to strangle the industry.
Studies show that hog manure generated in Manitoba accounts for only 1.5 percent of the phosphorous getting into Lake Winnipeg.
However, the new law extends to the whole province the ban on the construction and expansion of hog barns and manure storage facilities. It also bans winter manure spreading.
New barns will be allowed only if they use advanced but undefined environmental practices to protect water. The law includes a new tax credit to help farmers acquire new technologies, but it is not clear that alternatives such as anaerobic digesters are practical in Manitoba.
The law also requires Winnipeg and other communities to improve their wastewater treatment plants and adds new protections for wetlands.
The barn construction ban is draconian and unfair. There are already safeguards such as requirements for each farm to have a government-approved manure management plan. The government has the right to inspect fields to ensure compliance. Also, it is illegal for manure to run off fields.
Almost 80 percent of hog manure is injected into the soil to prevent run off.
Keystone Agricultural Producers president Doug Chorney said the law will force hog production out of the province.
The irony is that Maple Leaf’s huge hog plant in Brandon will increasingly get its supply from neighbouring jurisdictions that are also in the Lake Winnipeg watershed but are not subject to Manitoba’s environmental laws.
The watershed encompasses Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario and parts of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota.
About 53 percent of the phosphorus entering the lake comes from outside Manitoba.
The largest source of phosphorus loading from the watershed comes from spring runoff. The water dissolves phosphorus from soil, fertilizer, manure, crop residue and other organic material.
In flood springs like the one just passed, the increased runoff has much higher concentrations of dissolved phosphorus.
Rather than freezing the province’s hog industry just as profitability is returning, it would be wiser for Manitoba to work with neighbouring provinces and states to create a regional watershed management group. A prime goal would be to better control drainage to lessen spring flooding and nutrient runoff.
One way to do that is to provide incentives such as tax rebates or payments to farmers to preserve wetlands that reduce spring run off and hold back nutrients.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Joanne Paulson collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
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