Farmscape for August 15, 2017

The Chair of Swine Innovation Porc suggests cereal based pork production offers Canada an edge in the global market place.
Canada's federal, provincial and territorial agriculture ministers agreed to key elements of the five year three billion dollar Canadian Agricultural Partnership, including commitments to science, research, and innovation, markets and trade, environmental sustainability and climate change, value-added agriculture and agri-food processing, building public trust and business risk management when they met last month.
Stewart Cressman, the Chair of Swine Innovation Porc, says research has been key to the success of Canada's pork industry.

Clip-Stewart Cressman-Swine Innovation Porc:
We're in an industry that can not eat its way out of the quantity of pork we produce in this country.
We've grown our industry because I believe we have had a quality product and we are competitive.
When we look at the product we export around the world on a percentage basis we're one of the leaders in this country.
I think part of that is the quality of pork that we can produce.
My personal view in looking at some of the research results is the cereal based diets in western Canada assist us in that.
It certainly doesn't mean that we can't produce quality pork on corn and soybean meal but I think there's certain things that come to the table with a cereal based pork production system which we have.
Given we don't have the population in western Canada that we have in eastern Canada, that makes it a natural for that to move to the Japans and the developing market that is China.
So I think research is really key in terms of looking at different components in a cereal based diet.

Cressman says Canada has a bit of an inferiority complex looking south to an industry that produces a large amount of pork in comparison but Canadian pork producers are among the world's leaders.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork