BY SARA KEDDY
Kings County Advertiser/Register
Pork Nova Scotia holds its annual meeting March 19 in Greenwich - but there won’t be a lot to talk about.
One-third of the province’s remaining pork producers will have to take a seat on the board: Terry Beck and Herman Berfelo go in for three-year terms, Jim Lamb and Joe VanBommel for two years and Lloyd Evans for just one year. There are, according to PNS, 16 active producers in good standing with the association.
That’s down from around 80 just three years ago. Overall production is down 73 per cent already into 2010 over 2009’s numbers - and that was a bad year, too. So was the year before that.
Gerald Vermeulen is leaving the association as chairman.
“I don’t have a pig on the property,” he says. Three other board members are off for the same reason.
“Pork Nova Scotia will still be there, but we’re not what we wee even three years ago: an office, research, help for producers. The new set of directors coming through are the ones transitioning us, trying to keep it going into the future.”
Vermeulen attributes most of the “dynamical change” in the pork industry to changes at the retail level since the mid-1990s, the conversion of corn crops to ethanol rather than feed use and the feasibility of running a processing facility, with its equipment, staff, inspections and other mandatory trappings; in smaller regions.
“It’s just not competitive to produce hogs here,” he says.
The demise of Bowlby’s slaughterhouse and store in Greenwood in February and the loss of Larsen’s kill floor in Berwick this month are just further symptoms.
“As long as the large distributors have all kinds of volume and product, they’ll be powerful. If something happens, the niche guy could set up shop and compete, but a lot has changed. The small guys are doing a few pigs a week and have a following of customers, but they’re doing it because they enjoy it.”
Vermeulen himself says one-third of his former pig barns are over 40 years old - too old to convert to future uses. There are dozens of other pig farmers like him in the province looking to convert barns and expertise into new production areas - “but, we’re all looking at the same time to find those niches.
“Nova Scotia needs to face the fact there could be nothing on the shelves if it can’t come across the border.” - Jim Lamb
“And, we have no wealth left to wait four or five more years to see results.”
In a niche
Jim Lamb’s Meadowbrook Farm goes back to 1978, when he was looking to get into a different type of farming than the rest of his family, and there seemed to be money in pigs.
“Pork had a cycle and there wasn’t any quota involved,” he says.
There were about 225 producers in Nova Scotia then, levelling off to 125 through the 1980s.
“Then it took the big drop. The decline started and it was a slippery slope. It went quick.”
Lamb shifted his focus to solely supply his own on-farm meat market.
“If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be here. To get the quality of pork we want, we do it. I’m positive in what we’re doing: a good job. People are responding.”
Long-term, though, Lamb is frustrated people don’t realize Nova Scotia “doesn’t have any food security.
“Other than milk and eggs, we can’t meet provincial consumption. A few years ago, we produced 60 per cent of the pork consumed here - now, it’s three per cent. It’s pretty sad to think 40 per cent of that goes through my little business.”
He warns, “it’s happening to all of our food supply.
“Nova Scotia needs to face the fact there could be nothing on the shelves if it can’t come across the border.”
Add to that scenario the already evident loss of $100 million in feed and operations spin-offs lost as Kings County pork production tanked in the last couple of years. There are also “a lot of empty barns, not worth nothing.
“I don’t know what industry could ever come back.”
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