Farmscape for April 24, 2008  (Episode 2825)

Manitoba's agriculture minister has announced her province will help cover the cost of processing the pork from hogs slaughtered as part of the Federal Cull Breeding Swine Program.

The 50 million dollar Federal Cull Breeding Swine Program, launched earlier this month, offers swine producers 225 dollars for each breeding animal culled.

Although meat from the culled animals may not end up in the commercial distribution chain, it can be diverted to Canada's food banks.

Yesterday Manitoba announced it will provide 500 thousand dollars to cover the cost of processing some of that meat.

Agriculture Minister Rosann Wowchuk says the effort will take some coordination among the farmers, the food bank, the processors and she's hoping others will come to the table to help further the effort.

Clip-Rosann Wowchuk-Manitoba Agriculture Minister 

Winnipeg Harvest will take the lead on this .

We have been in discussion with processors and now Winnipeg Harvest will try to get other businesses on board because as well as processors there is trucking and other things that come into play here.

We have to move the product.

We were told by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce that they would help to get some of their members come on board and make some contributions to this so we're hopeful that this money will stimulate some additional donations by other people.

Winnipeg Harvest has been talking to the Mennonite Central Committee to look at whether some of this product can be canned so there's a wide variety of people involved and I think this is a very good news story.

The pork industry is being helped out because their numbers will be reduced but somebody will benefit from that and that's some of the many families that have to count on food banks for their protein.

Wowchuk notes the funds being made available by the province will actually cover the cost of processing 150 thousand kilograms of pork.

She estimates about five thousand surplus sows will be able to be handled through the program.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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