NIVERVILLE, Man. – The countryside around here is like a rural economic developer’s dream.
Large-scale hog barns can be seen on every section of land, giving jobs to hundreds of barn workers and truck drivers who live in the bustling towns that fill the area between Winnipeg and the U.S. border.
This is the heart of Manitoba’s pig belt. But it is a heart that isn’t beating as strongly as it once did and may require a bypass to prevent paralysis.
Farmers here can’t get good local feed grains.
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There will likely always be a feed shortage in this area because of the large number of barns and because local farmers are limited in what they can supply due to fusarium headblight.
“The truckers are doing well,” said Marcel Hacault, who owns a 100 sow, farrow-to-finish operation south of Niverville.
“I know some guys who are bringing in barley from Dauphin.”
That costs an extra 30 cents per bushel, if the trucker can find a backhaul.
Fusarium headblight is a fungal infection of cereal heads that drastically reduces yields and makes grain semi-poisonous to livestock.
Fusarium is also a growing problem in western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan, but is not nearly as bad as this region south of Winnipeg where humid conditions encourage it.
For hog farmers, who need large amounts of feed, this problem has cost them a lot of money and has pushed the industry into other areas.
“I used to buy all my barley from a farmer near here,” said Hacault.
“He quit growing it because of the fusarium levels.”
Hacault makes five rations for his pigs. He won’t allow more than 1.2 parts per million of fusarium, but the barley in the area often has five parts per million.
He had a few stressful years of working the phones to find clean supplies, but has now found two barley growers to the west who can generally meet his needs. He uses about 500 tonnes of feed grains per year.
Because they are further away, the barley costs more, but he has little choice but to buy it.
Hacault said a number of good, high yielding new varieties of corn are being grown in southeastern Manitoba. They don’t suffer from fusarium and they make excellent pig feed.
But there aren’t huge amounts of it yet, and corn has only limited usefulness.
Hacault likes to feed barley to his dry sows because they need the roughage to aid digestion. And the packers don’t want too much corn in finishing rations because corn creates yellow fat.
Barley produces white fat, which is desired by many pork buyers.
Hacault said some farmers are shipping their pigs to barns in southern Minnesota, Iowa and other U.S. states, and to western Manitoba to have them finished.
A recent study by the George Morris Centre in Guelph, Ont., found that Manitoba had lost its distinction as being the cheapest place to feed a pig to southern Minnesota.
The provincial government thinks fusarium is costing the provincial economy hundreds of millions of dollars in lost hog production, slaughter and processing.
Hacault, who is head of Manitoba Pork, said it has dampened the rosy view of the future that many in the industry had a few years ago.
Fusarium is a crisis for the province and needs to be treated as such, he said.
If it isn’t, and if the disease lingers, the simple economics of feeding a pig in his area will see Manitoba’s dreams of a boom in hog production exported south.
“They’ll go where there are clean feed grains,” he said. “We need a solution.”
