Beyond the Barn

National Hog Farmer magazine editor Dale Miller says it is “business as usual” for the magazine, even though its parent company has sought bankruptcy protection.

Penton Business Media Holdings Inc. publishes 113 trade magazines. Published reports indicate revenue fell 7.5 per cent in 2008 and a further 26.2 per cent in 2009. The economy-wide recession was blamed.

Miller says Penton filed “a pre-organized Chapter 11” and has made an agreement with its lenders to reorganize its debt “just like a lot of hog farmers have been doing.”

Pediatricians in the United States want the federal Food and Drug Administration to require hazard labels on hotdogs. Of 141 choking deaths in 2006, 41 were food-related. Hot dogs wouldn’t be the only food to get that label, normally required on toys with small parts. The American Academy of Pediatrics wants to add raw carrots, grapes, apples, hard candies, popcorn, peanuts and marshmallows. Doctors want parents to cut these foods into pieces too small to cause choking and believe that labels would be an extra step to prevent deaths.

Last year, Humane Society International surveyed more than 3,000 Australians and found that over 93 per cent questioned didn’t know that the label “free range” applied to meat from pigs that had access to the outdoors only in the first few weeks of life before being transferred to a “factory farming operation.”

Lisa Chalk, communications manager for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), complains that terms like “free range,” “corn-fed” and “organic” are used inconsistently. Australia’s largest animal welfare organization is calling for mandatory national standards.

(click the links below to access each Beyond the Barn story)

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) continues to offer loans to farmers to build big barns at the same time as it tries to cut the pig population, charges an anti-big pig barn organization.

The Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is petitioning federal Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who happens to be from Iowa, to suspend all loans to specialized hog and poultry operations. “USDA is currently guaranteeing loans to new production facilities, which contribute to over-supply in an already saturated marketplace,” says an open letter to Vilsack published in early August.

“The Canadian government’s NZ$100 million support for their ailing pork industry is essentially subsidies in drag,” New Zealand Pork said in August. “Cheap subsidized pork will make its way to New Zealand, undermining our local industry,” charged New Zealand Pork Chief Executive Sam McIvor.

He noted that New Zealand already imports 200,000 kilograms of Canadian pork weekly – “pork that can be produced using growth hormones and other standards of production that are not up to New Zealand standards.”

Eyebrows were raised in mid-August when Ontario hog marketings rose to substantially higher levels than normal. In the week ending Aug. 21, Ontario Pork recorded sales of 110,000 market hogs, considerably higher than in previous weeks. What was going on?

Was there an influx of pigs from Quebec? Had Ontario producers bought a huge number of cheap weaners from Western Canada in the spring and fed them, counting on a summer price rally that never came?

The answer, according to Ontario Pork’s sales team manager Patrick O’Neil, was somewhat less dramatic than either of those scenarios. Packers were hanging onto contract hogs in July and slaughtering fewer of them, resulting in a surplus of pigs in barns.

In China, food makes up one third of the consumer price index and pork is a big chunk of that. On average, the Chinese consume 110 pounds of meat per person per year and 65 per cent of that is pork. There are too many pigs in China, so inflation is likely to be kept in check. China needs 410 million pigs, including 41 million sows, to keep production in equilibrium, according to its central planning agency. There were 44.7 million live hogs and 48.3 million sows at the end of June, a huge increase from the year before, when there was a pork shortage and high prices.

Click the links below to access the stories.

China is the world’s largest pork producer and, with more than a billion mouths to feed, the largest consumer as well.

Still, China has an oversupply, pork prices have dropped below breakeven and in late spring the government responded by buying pork and freezing it in reserves.

It has been two years since China had a pork shortage because of a harsh winter and blue ear disease. Unwilling to rely on imports, the government responded by offering incentives and more large pork facilities were built to boost livestock numbers. High prices helped.