Farmers have been hit hard by the ongoing labor dispute at Alberta’s major hog slaughtering facility, says a manager of the Western Hog Exchange.
“It’s a bad, bad situation for the hog industry,” said Mack Rennie, who is forced to find a taker for an extra 6,000 hogs a day that normally would be slaughtered at the Fletcher’s Fine Foods plant in Red Deer.
It costs the hog exchange more than $3,000 per load to truck the hogs to the John Morrell and Co. plant in Sioux City, Iowa, owned by the multinational company, Smithfield.
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One day last week, the Western Hog Exchange, the marketing arm of the Alberta Pork Producers Development Corporation, sent more than 30 loads to the American hog slaughtering plant.
“This has a real negative impact to producers,” said Rennie, marketing and finance manager. “We’re the injured third party here.”
While Rennie would prefer keeping Alberta hogs on the Prairies, he said it’s difficult for many Canadian plants to take the excess animals.
Gary Fuller, assistant general manager at the Springhill plant in Neepawa, Man., said it isn’t taking any of the excess hogs from Alberta.
“We’re physically not able to make that move,” said Fuller.
The western Manitoba plant kills about 3,000 hogs a day and is not set up to kill any of Alberta’s excess hogs.
It’s the same story at the J.M. Schneider plant in Winnipeg. The Manitoba plant is geared to kill 25,000 to 27,000 hogs a week. Before the strike it was running at capacity and doesn’t have the killing facilities to slaughter more.
Rennie said Intercontinental Packers in Saskatoon is helping them out, but it is in the delicate position of wondering if it should add more staff without knowing when the strike will end.
