Behind the Lines - Better Pork June 2009

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

As a commentator in the Globe and Mail recently put it, the hog industry in Canada "continues to stagger from crisis to conflict."

Ontario's industry certainly had both in April and early May. The "swine flu crisis" triggered market speculation and unnecessary trade actions, stripping a reported $30 a hog in just three days from the already low value of pigs on June contracts.

At this writing, pork industry leaders are readying an appeal to governments for funding to support them through this crisis. The same reasoning is behind this as with the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis that struck the beef industry in 2003 and which also received funding.

In the Mexican town of La Gloria, downwind from a big Smithfield pig barn, it turns out that photogenic five-year-old Edgar Hernandez was not "patient zero" in the swine flu crisis. More than 1,000 townsfolk had similar symptoms in the weeks before, and in fact a similar sickness had been noted in another region of the country weeks before that.

While the swine flu alert was being sounded, a new round of conflict appeared in the making. A University of Guelph-Ministry of Environment sampling of water on Lake Huron appeared, at first glance, to implicate livestock agriculture as the major source of E. coli bacteria found in the lake and on popular beaches, with the contribution from human sources being virtually negligible.

But, as with the Mexican town of La Gloria, all is not as it first seems. Better Pork staff asked questions and found the study limited and its implications questionable. The water samples implicating agriculture as a polluter were taken from an area with lots of farms, few people and no municipal sewage systems. Furthermore, the researchers pointed out that the DNA sampling had a high margin of error. It's hard to say what will become of this study. For continued coverage, watch our website: www.betterfarming.com.

While most aspects of the flu epidemic were moving too fast to be covered in a magazine, on page 40 of this issue we do offer you an important article for pork producers, written by Beth Young and Cate Dewey entitled: "What you should know about swine flu."

Batch farrowing has been around for a long time and, even if you are one of the many who have been using this technique, you may learn a thing or two from our cover story by Kate Procter which begins on page 6. And, finally, if you missed this year's version of the always information-packed London Swine conference, Procter has produced an article drawn in part from a presentation there on managing today's hyper-prolific sows. 

ROBERT IRWIN