There are more signs that the Canadian hog sector is slowly rebounding after downsizing for several years.
Canadian hog producers held an estimated 12 million hogs on April 1, up 1.8 percent from the same date in 2011, said Statistics Canada in its quarterly hogs report.
The growth was mostly in Western Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan, where the herd increased by almost 14 percent in the last year to 905,000 head.
Manitoba’s herd was static at 2.63 million.
Alberta’s herd grew by 3.3 percent to 1.51 million head.
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British Columbia’s herd grew one percent to 90,000.
In Eastern Canada, the herd grew by 0.6 percent.
The number of sows on Canadian farms remained virtually unchanged from April 1 last year at 1.3 million and is still well down from the peak reached in 2005 of 1.6 million.
Hog producers intend to farrow 693,600 sows during the second quarter of 2012, up 2.3 percent from the farrowings during the same period in 2011.
In the first quarter of 2012, 5.4 million hogs were sent to pork packing plants in Canada, a decline of 0.1 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Slaughter in the eastern provinces decreased by 1.7 percent, while that in the western provinces increased by 2.3 percent.
About 1.4 million hogs were exported during the first quarter of 2012, down almost one percent compared to the same period a year earlier.
Exports in the quarter were about half of what they were in 2008 before the U.S. country-of-origin labelling came into effect.
