Jim Morris has been in the eye of Saskatchewan’s hog marketing whirlwind as general manager of the SPI marketing agency.
Last week he was hurled out by the fierce winds that have blown among large and small producers, making the provincial industry a tempestuous place.
SPI has been guarded in explaining why it fired Morris on May 22. He has been with the agency for 23 years and is president of Canada Pork International. Now the national group will need to replace him.
Don Hrapchak, one of the hog marketing agency’s managers, said “it just came to a point in time when his direction and (the board of directors) direction did not meet.”
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He would not elaborate on the divergence.
SPI chair John Germs did not return calls.
Morris said the letter that told him he was fired was vague, but mainly referred to details of the way he laid off staff at the board’s processing plant in Moose Jaw.
“The reasons that were given are pretty lame ones that don’t hold much water,” said Morris. “It comes to the extreme inexperience of this board …. They’re nervous and don’t quite know what to say.”
Most observers say Morris was fired because he was resisting fundamental reforms to SPI, including making sweeping changes at the Moose Jaw plant and ending SPI’s monopoly on hog sales.
“It just got to be a contest of wills,” said Riceton producer John Keen. “If the pork board disappears, then the empire Jim has built over the past 20 years disappears. He was trying to hang on to it.”
Harvey Wagner, head of the Saskatchewan Association of Hog Producers, said producers like him had been pressuring SPI to back away from directly operating the Moose Jaw plant and the marketing board at the same time.
Morris objected to that, he said.
Florian Possberg, who owns large hog operations near Humboldt, said he wanted changes at the Moose Jaw plant and wanted to move away from single-desk selling, both of which Morris opposed.
“When SPI had comments on policy, it often came from Mr. Morris rather than the chairman of the board, and in an elected organization really the policy should come from the elected body,” Possberg said.
Producers like Possberg and Wagner have been pushing for an end to single-desk hog selling. Recently, agriculture minister Eric Upshall introduced legislation allowing the province to unilaterally break marketing boards’ monopolies if it wishes.
Morris opposed the challenges to single-desk marketing and criticized Upshall.
Keen said some of SPI’s directors want single-desk marketing to end, as does the agriculture minister and most of the large hog producers. But the small producers who want to save single-desk marketing are unlikely to revolt over Morris’ firing.
A few years ago, Keen said, Morris and SPI alienated small producers in their drive to increase hog production by embracing large operations.
Once the large-scale barns were running, they wanted to break from SPI’s hog-selling monopoly.
That left Morris between the small producers who felt left out, and the large producers who wanted out.
“He had no real friends,” said Keen. “No advocates, no friends, no basis of support.”
National Farmer’s Union president Nettie Wiebe, an opponent of “mega-barns,” said Morris’ firing is “ironical.”
She said Morris supported free trade with the United States. Her group opposed free trade because of fears the industry would become based on mass production and the kind of large units now springing up in Saskatchewan.
“Jim Morris was caught in the middle.”
