Beyond the Barn

Chinese pork on steroids?

Clenbuterol, a treatment for respiratory infections in horses but never cleared for use in food animals, is showing up more frequently in pork in China’s far western Xinjiang region, according to Associated Press. Consumers end up in hospital with stomach aches and heart palpitations.

Clenbuterol hurries pigs to market and increases lean meat deposition. It’s also known as a performance enhancer. Recently cyclist and Tour de France champion Alberto Contador was cleared of wrongdoing by the Spanish Cycling Federation after he claimed that he had failed a drug test because he had eaten contaminated meat. German table tennis player Dimitrij Ovtcharov was also cleared by anti-doping authorities. They accepted his claim that he had eaten drug-tainted meat from China.

Inconsistent reports on red meat

In mid-February, a British Sunday newspaper published a leaked report from a forthcoming report by the UK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SAC). The report that meat consumption should be restricted to 70 grams a day (the equivalent of three strips of bacon) may have made pork producers splutter in their morning tea.

But when the study confirming the link between higher meat consumption and cancer was officially released at the end of the month, the meat industry hardly reacted at all.

Uncollectible loans and unsustainable agriculture

The Nova Scotia government wrote off $16.2 million in bad loans from 2008. The loans included more than $1 million in uncollectible student loans, and smaller amounts for pharmacare premiums and unpaid fees.

But by far the majority of the uncollectible loans had been made by the Nova Scotia agriculture department. “This unusually high amount is due to defaulted hog loan accounts under the Farm Loan Board,” said a ministry of finance press release.

“For many years, hog farming in Nova Scotia was heavily subsidized by government,” the release went on. “When government support was discontinued in 2007-08, many hog farmers were unable to sustain their business due to low pork prices and rising production costs.”

The ‘bacon bubble’ that didn’t burst

Last October, the Wall Street Journal announced that the “bacon bubble” was set to burst.

Pork industry executives braced themselves for the worst, according to MeatingPlace Magazine, and it didn’t come. Well, maybe on the “fine dining” side. High end restaurateurs had been putting bacon into everything, including cocktails.

Otherwise, sales to middle and working class consumers continued upward, rather than dying off as expected after Labour Day.

The Consumer Price Index for bacon was up 32.5 per cent from the previous October.

Wendy’s quick-serve restaurant (“fast food” is apparently now a pejorative term) expanded the use of smoked bacon from one to all of its sandwiches sold in the United States.

‘Pocket pigs’ pose problems

 “Pocket pigs” got a big boost last year in Britain when celebrity guests, including soccer star David Beckham and his glamorous wife Victoria, went home from the Golden Globe movie awards with miniature pot-bellied pigs in their goodie bags. The pigs, which cost £3,000 to buy, were compliments of the owner of Patty’s Royal Dandie Miniature Pet Pig. It was a good publicity stunt.

By early December British authorities were warning of dangers involved in buying these pigs as pets for children. The pigs can carry and pass on the skin condition erysipeloid and the bacterium Streptococcus suis, which can lead to illness, including meningitis and deafness in humans.

Worldwide hog production shrinks and Smithfield rocks

Only last June, a troubled Smithfield Foods Inc., based in Virginia, was denying published reports from Brazil that it was going to sell its pork production to JBS, the Brazilian meat packing giant that had already purchased Smithfield’s beef operations.

What a difference a few months make for the self-described world’s largest pork processor and hog producer. While worldwide hog production shrank two per cent, Smithfield reported record high earnings in the quarter ending Oct. 31.

Commercial feed is the salmonella culprit

Wonder how salmonella got in your pig barn? The most likely source is commercial feed, according to a paper published in the November 2010 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Scientists from the College of Veterinary Medicine, Ohio State University, tested feed in bins before it was exposed to the barn, and fecal and environmental samples inside the barn as well. Contaminated feed was found in eight of 36 barns tested. In four of five cases, the time and place of contaminated samples of feed and feces matched.

New Zealand clamps down on sow stalls

In a December editorial, The New Zealand Herald credits “the power of shoppers” for forcing a new country-wide pig handling code that will limit the time sows spend in dry stalls beginning in late 2012 and ban stalls outright three years later.

A furor followed the May 2009 televising of a tape made during a night-time break-in at a pig barn by a radical group, accompanied by former pork industry pitchman, an iconic New Zealand comedian. Agriculture Minister David Carter ordered an urgent review of the pig welfare code, which allowed pregnant sows to be kept in individual stalls with a minimum area of 1.2 square metres.