Farmscape for December 24, 2012

The chair of Manitoba Pork Council reports the province's pork producers have been overwhelmingly supportive of a proposed provincial hog stabilization program.
Last month, as part of its semi-annual meetings, Manitoba Pork Council unveiled a proposed provincial hog stabilization program.
Manitoba Pork Council Chair Karl Kynoch says the goal is to help stabilize cash flow during long downturns.

Clip-Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork Council:
One of the big challenges that our hog industry is having, over the past they've lost a lot of money and a lot of the producers have used up their equity so what we're trying to do is to develop a program to be able to stabilize the cash flow for the hog producers.
In turn, what we would do as Manitoba Pork, we would go out and we would actually borrow a loan and then when ever the price of raising hogs, if you're receiving a lot less than what you're getting  or producers are losing money, we would help to stabilize that.
We would give the producers some money to bring them closer to a break even.
This would put money back into their pockets to help them with paying wages and to be able to buy the feed grains.
In the fall, when we did our Fall Meetings, we introduced this proposal to our producers to see if they were willing to buy into the concept of the program and they were overwhelmingly pleased with where we were going with the program.
Really what producers would like to see is a cash injection but I think all our producers realize that's not an option and the only option is something like this, some type of a loan to bridge that funding in times of low income.
We had a very positive response back from our producers during our fall meetings both in Portage and in Niverville so basically what that does is gives us direction to continue to move forward to try to bring the program to a reality.

Kynoch acknowledges, to move forward, the program will first need to be approved by the provincial Agriculture Minister and staff with Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives, then by the Treasury Board and Cabinet so there are still some hurdles.
He hopes to be able to let producers know early in the new year one way or the other whether the program will happen.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council