Manitoba’s hog industry is living in the dimming twilight of an era of expansion that made it one of North America’s engines of productivity and efficiency.
Regulations that have prevented new barns from being built for more than five years have caused the industry to contract.
“We’re still in the limbo situation we’ve been in since 2008,” said Manitoba Pork Council manager Andrew Dickson.
The provincial government brought in a Red River Valley hog barn moratorium in 2008 and then extended it to the entire province in 2011’s infamous Save Lake Winnipeg Act.
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The government claimed hog manure was a significant cause of Lake Winnipeg’s nutrification problems when it explained why hog producers, but not other livestock industries, were singled out by the legislation and regulations.
Most scientific analyses of Lake Manitoba’s problems do not identify hog manure as a particularly significant source of phosphorus loading.
Tougher manure-spreading regulations are adding to farmers’ woes. They switched the control focus from nitrogen to phosphorus, forcing producers to find thousands more acres on which to spread manure.
That was possible in some areas, but producers in the hog-heavy Red River Valley found they couldn’t find enough land on which to spread the lower amounts of manure they were allowed.
However, they were stymied by the moratorium if they considered moving their barns farther west, where there are few hog barns, active interest from crop farmers for the manure and areas that are phosphorus-deficient.
Dickson said the industry is frustrated and unsure what to do. The only way a new barn can be built is if it incorporates an anaerobic manure biodigester, but those don’t work well for hog manure and are too expensive to justify.
In the meantime, farmers have become cautious as thousands of barns age toward the end of their natural lives.
“Producers are looking to the future. Decisions have to be made very soon as to whether they’re going to replace their existing barns or just fix them up as best they can and operate them until they collapse,” said Dickson.
“Right now the attitude is, ‘we’re not doing anything, and we’ll fix up what we’ve got, and try to make it last longer.’ ”
