The Rural Voice, 1998-03, Page 22"People are thinking about
microbes," Powell said. The
Washington -based Food Marketing
Institute conducts yearly surveys of
1,000 Americans and found that from
1996 to 1997 the perceived threat to
food safety from spoilage, E. coli and
quality control increased 20 per cent.
Producers want consumers to have
the best, most accurate scientific
information but perceptions get in the
way. "Things get messy. People
don't play fair," Powell said.
Part of the reason there seems to
be more foodborne disease is because
technology has improved to be able
to detect the bacteria. "With all the
attention we're looking harder and
"People are thinking
about microbes."
have better tools to find it," Powell
said.
But each of these outbreaks is just
the tip of the iceberg in discovering
management errors that led to the
problem, Powell said. In the Jack-in-
the-Box outbreak a multi-million
dollar company wasn't checking to
make sure its hamburgers were being
cooked long enough.
In the case of the unpasteurized
apple juice, the investigation turned
up a host of problems. The company
told growers that only apples from
the trees were to be used in its juice
but didn't audit its procedures and
Heartland offers community input in corporate farming
Food safety is also a major concern of people in
potential growth markets for Canadian pork, said
J. Stewart Stone, chief financial officer and
director of marketing for Heartland Livestock Services,
the second keynote speaker at the Centralia meeting.
Food safety concerns will define consumer preference,
he said. Once Asian buyers wanted to inspect Canadian
packing plants. Today they want to go right to the farm
and make sure safety issues are being handled at the
producer level.
Heartland, formed from the amalgamation of the
livestock operations of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool
and Manitoba Pool Elevators, is leading the expansion
of pork production on the prairies. Saskatchewan, which
had fewer than one million pigs at the beginning of
1996, it expecting to pass two million by the year 2000.
That growth is based on market research that shows by
2050 the majority of the world population will be
affluent by today's standards and population growth
will have stopped. People will be able to afford to eat
more meat and 43 per cent of the meat consumed in the
world is pork. There is tremendous consumption of pork
in Pacific Rim countries, an area with which western
Canada already has a trading relationship.(From
Saskatchewan it's closer to Los Angeles than to
Toronto.)
The prairies have natural advantages for pork
production. Feed costs represent 66 per cent of the cash
costs of producing a market weight pig and in 1994,
Saskatchewan had feed costs that were 36 per cent
below Ontario's, 32 per cent below the U.S. midwest
and three percent below Alberta.
The discontinuance of the transportation subsidy,
combined with rail line abandonment, means farmers in
the eastern prairies have to spend one third to one half
of their grain cheque to get the crop to port for shipping.
The number of elevators has been reduced from 1300
to 300, meaning farmers have to drive 50-60 miles to an
elevator. It has led farmers to look for ways to add value
to their grain. The prairies have seven major packing
companies
The other advantage Saskatchewan has is space. With
the density of 3.5 pigs per 100 hectares it has a livestock
density hundreds of times less than major hog
producing areas in Europe, 70 times less than North
Carolina and one-tenth the density of the U.S. midwest.
The Saskatchewan economy is also very sympathetic to
agriculture.
Heartland built on this support for agriculture, setting
up an expansion program based on involving the local
community as investors in large, three -site livestock
operations. It seeks 50 to 75 per cent community equity
in building units based around 2400 -head sow barns
producing 1100 weaned pigs per week. Each production
unit will have four nursery barns at 2200 head each for
eight weeks, and eight finishing barns at 2000 head
each.
Community groups contact Heartland if they're
interested in the idea. Heartland goes out to talk about
the details then leaves it to the community to decide if it
wants to go further. If they want to proceed, a letter of
intent starts the process. Heartland provides the group
with a business plan and the group organizes a board
and gets people to sell shares (a project can cost $9.3 to
$12.3 million depending on the number of finishing
barns — up to 50 per cent of the hogs can be finished by
farmers in their own barns). The local board also
identifies sites (they buy 160 acres but lease all but 40
acres for cropping) and gets necessary permits from the
municipality. Once the equity is raised, the project gets
additional financing using Saskatchewan Wheat Pool's
top credit rating.
Heartland provides the genetics, feed, farm manager,
staff training, herd health and ongoing management.
The community gets 18-20 jobs, and shareholders get
grain delivery rights. Some people have invested to get
the rights to manure from the operation to spread on
their land, he said.
The program was so successful, Heartland signed
agreements with 27 Saskatchewan communities in the
first six weeks and cut off further agreements for the
time being since it plans to build six operations each
year and didn't want to have communities waiting too
long. It is still looking at sites in Manitoba and Alberta.
Asked about the acceptance of this kind of corporate
farming, Stone indicated that other big operations were
on the way to the prairies. "You can either have
corporate farming on the prairies and participate in it, or
you can have corporate farming and not participate in
it," he said.0
18 THE RURAL VOICE