Farmscape for March 31, 2008  (Episode 2796)

An official with Big Sky Farms suggests the recently announced moratorium on hog industry expansion in much of Manitoba underscores the suitability of Saskatchewan for pork production.

Earlier this month the Manitoba government announced it will impose moratoriums on hog industry expansion in three areas of the province.

Florian Possberg, the director of industry relations with Humboldt based Big Sky Farms, says producers in Saskatchewan still have a vision of increasing hog production long term as a cornerstone of agriculture.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Big Sky Farms

What we see in Manitoba is really you've had a lot of your production based in the Red River Valley flood area and it's taken away a lot of the good will and support that the industry enjoyed five and ten years ago.

Once you have a government that divorces themselves from growing the future of the business, which we see is happening in Manitoba, that's not a comforting thought for the whole industry there.

Saskatchewan, quite frankly, we don't have a Red River Valley.

We don't have the issues with the environment even though we think some of the issues have been taken out of context in Manitoba and that's unfortunate but we just haven't had the bad experiences in Saskatchewan because quite frankly we've got a different environment.

We're just a whole lot less sensitive to the kind of problems that the Manitoba industry has faced.

We truly believe that Saskatchewan has the environment, we have the feed stocks, we have the space.

We know we can produce hogs economically and very healthy hogs so we think the future for hog production is bright for Saskatchewan.

Possberg notes, with about 46 percent of all the cultivated land in Canada, Saskatchewan has the feed and the space necessary to raise livestock.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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