Farmscape for January 9, 2017

The Chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board says the excess capacity currently available in western Canadian pork processing plants offers an excellent opportunity for new people to enter the industry and become significant players.
An imitative launched in November by the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board is aimed to renewing the province's pork production infrastructure to better utilize unused western Canadian processing capacity.
Florian Possberg, the Chair of Sask Pork, says western Canada, particularly Saskatchewan with its wide open spaces and abundance of feed grains, has a real competitive edge in terms of hog production.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
In western Canada we really have quite a bit of excess processing capacity at a number of our plants.
There really seems to be renewed interest for additional hogs to be finished in western Canada to supply extra hog numbers to these plants.
We think there's some momentum to get that done.
Although our industry has not been in expansion mode here in western Canada for so many years that we've really lost the infrastructure to expand and grow our industry so 2017 will be really interesting for us.
We're challenging our producers to look at growing capacity here for production again and we'll see where it goes.
We're optimistic.
We're still helping to feed the world and western Canada is a great place to do that.

Possberg says consolidation has resulted in a lot fewer producers than we've had in the past and producers are more specialized.
He says there's room for everybody, big and small, and there's opportunity for other producers to enter the industry and become larger players.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork