Farmscape for July 10, 2013

The president of H@m's Marketing Services reports while increased live hog prices have improved the profitability picture for Canada's pork producers high feed costs continue to create challenges.
As a result of drought last year in the U.S. Midwest North American hog producers faced dramatic increases in the cost of feed grains, particularly corn and soybeans resulting in dramatic losses.
H@m's Marketing Services present Brad Rodgers, on hand yesterday in Headingly for the official opening of the organization's new head office, says right now producers are doing better.

Clip-Brad Rodgers-H@m's Marketing Services:
At this point the producers are doing not too bad because the prices have gone up.
They're still facing a lot of challenges with the feed grains.
The feed grains are very expensive.
At one point the producer was losing over 30 dollars a pig from any of the plants and now it is above that now that we are making a little bit of money.
One of the things that we're noticing in our region is that at one time barley was a crop that was grown a lot in Manitoba.
Because of the price of soybeans being so high and corn being so high a lot of the barley acres are completely disappearing.
Farmers aren't growing those crops anymore.
That's becoming more of a challenge for us because Maple Leaf mandates that we have to have a certain amount of barley in our rations and so it's getting harder and harder to find barley and at a reasonable cost.

Rodgers notes H@ms used to represent a lot of family farms and colonies especially in southeastern Manitoba but, as a result of the dramatic economic changes within the hog industry, a lot of producers have gone out of business.
He says H@ms currently represents about 290 producers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the bulk of those being colonies.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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