For its size, Manitoba’s pork sector is an overachiever. Here’s how it happened

How NAFTA, the end of the Crow Rate and the end of single-desk marketing shaped the sector, and what got lost along the way.

Ian Smith’s hog farm hasn’t changed much since his family began raising pigs in the late 1960s.

t has no pit system. Smith scrapes the pens and spreads straw twice a day. His 10 to 15 sows spend time outside. On his 160 acres near Argyle in Manitoba’s Interlake, he raises his own barley and hay with ancient farm equipment, keeps about 100 laying hens and sells purebred Shorthorn cattle.

“I’m a working museum,” he said.

Why it matters: Manitoba’s hog sector looks vastly different than it did 30 years ago. The number of farms has dwindled, the number of hogs has surged, and the average business model has undergone a major shift.

A new economic study, which Manitoba Pork released earlier this summer, shows that at about the time Smith’s family started raising pigs, they were one of 15,000 to 20,000 hog farms in Manitoba that each raised a few hundred animals.

Today, there are 556 hog farms in Manitoba, according to census data from Statistics Canada. In 2021, the number of animals per farm reached its highest yet at just over 6,100, the agency reported.

According to Manitoba Pork, the province collectively raised nearly five million hogs in 2022 and the sector provides some $2.75 billion to the provincial economy.