This province has the necessary pillars for a thriving and expanding hog industry – plentiful farm land, water, feed, entrepreneurs and a pork processing industry. But alas, industry expansion has remained sluggish over the years with thousands of producers exiting the business. At one time in the 1990s, Alberta had 4,000 commercial producers, today there are but a few hundred left with Hutterite colonies dominating the business. Production in Alberta is still significant at 3.5 million hogs, but that's only about 15 per cent of the production in Canada. The big dogs are Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. The latter contains the largest hog processing plant in Canada at 70,000 head per day.
The industry in Alberta has had its ups and downs including political battles with government and processors. Thirty years ago there were drawn out fights between the Alberta Hog Producers Marketing Board and the packing industry led by Peter Pocklington, owner of the Gainers Meat plant. At one time, the Producer Board even owned its own packing plant along with a string of hog assembling yards across the province. One ponders if hog marketing hijinks back then played a role in the demise of the industry. Those were the good old days – nowadays the single-desk hog marketing board is gone along with many plants; the big Oylmel plant in Red Deer is the sole survivor of that era. One can't help but recall that at the same time hog production in Saskatchewan and Manitoba was expanding significantly. Dozens of 5,000 sow production units were being built in both provinces. There was some expansion in Alberta, but mostly from colonies and a few dedicated commercial operators. Investors and commercial hog production companies seemed unwilling to expand the Alberta hog industry.
As expected, the industry and government engaged in a number of studies to ascertain what the roadblocks were to expansion. There never was a conclusive report; many of the studies were reluctant to point figures at some of the obvious problems. One of the problems was that compared to the two neighbouring provinces to the east, our governments, both provincial and local, were not helpful in providing support to big new hog farms. Many municipal and regional governments put regulatory roadblocks in place that made it difficult to establish large hog production units, which many small towns and counties saw as malodourous manure producing nightmares. With more friendly governments just across the border it didn't take long for investors to bail out of Alberta. Only the colonies were able to expand relatively unhindered. To make matters even worse in the eyes of the hog industry, the Alberta government decided to regulate intensive livestock production under new legislation called the Agricultural Operations Practices Act (AOPA). The Agriculture Minister of the day also decided to avoid any insinuation of a conflict of interest by placing the enforcement of that legislation under the auspices of the Natural Resources Conversation Board (NRCB). That board had no previous connection to agriculture and had to spend years getting the expertise to understand the issues. There is considerable opinion that the NRCB, by accident or design, was not helpful in encouraging the expansion or establishing commercial hog operations and cattle feedlots. One wonders how much investment in those production sectors has been lost due to regulatory obstinance and environmental roadblocks.
To be fair, Manitoba producers also faced regulatory roadblocks to more commercial hog production expansion. In fact, for many years the NDP government there enforced a moratorium on the construction of new hog barns. That set the industry back, but that may now change with the return of a new PC government who are likely to end the moratorium to spur on more economic development. One ponders whether any hope for new hog production in Alberta may be further set back by the present NDP government in Alberta. No moratorium has yet been announced, but there may be ominous signs. A couple of weeks ago, the provincial government terminated the producer/industry advisory committee that guided the enforcement of the AOPA legislation. The management and enforcement of the act will now be concentrated completely in the hands of government bureaucrats. That will make it a lot easier for the government to make an arbitrary decision for a moratorium on not just any more commercial hog production units, but also any more cattle feedlot expansion. For a highly urban-based NDP government and an entrenched detached bureaucracy, such a moratorium almost seems inevitable. It happened in Manitoba – it can happen here.