Canada\u2019s pork export growth mirrors the overall growth in Canadian pork production. Over the past 24 years the industry has grown by 84%. This is due to the increase in exports. The top 3 countries that Canada exports to are the US (over 50%), Japan (about 20%), and Mexico (5%). Canada is even increasing its share in world export markets, while the US is steadily decreasing. Canadian slaughter capacity has grown by 45% over 10 years. It has gone from a capacity of 340,000 head per week in 1995 to 490,000 per week in 2004, but it has yet to reach the slaughter of 490,000. The US daily capacity is four times greater than Canadian daily capacity. In Canada there are only 3 slaughter plants that run double slaughter shifts. All major US packers tend to run double shifts, and Olymel and Maple Leaf in Canada have stated their intentions of running a double shift. Maple Leaf has even put in an application for environmental approval to run double shifts. Maple Leaf has purchased the likes of Gainers, Burns, Schneider and Mitchell\u2019s, and Olymel has purchased the likes of Fletcher\u2019s. This brings the Canadian participants to 27 plants owned by 20 different companies. The reason for fewer companies owning larger volumes is economies of scale (that is, they can lower cost of production, increase profit from the volume, and increase competitiveness in the world market). Since 1997, the number of hog operations in Canada has been steadily declining while the number of pigs per farm has been increasing. The leading production firm in Canada is Elite Swine ran by Maple Leaf (they had 122,000 sows in 2003). The leading cause for this is the poor financial returns that plague the industry and force the smaller operations to shut down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Canada\u2019s pork export growth mirrors the overall growth in Canadian pork production. Over the past 24 years the industry has grown by 84%. This is due to the increase in exports. The top 3 countries that Canada exports to are the US (over 50%), Japan (about 20%), and Mexico (5%). Canada is even increasing its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[930],"tags":[8882,18311,2858,3814,6784,190,2883,12670,286,2455,20007,158,34,2771,24978,2878,8791,5110,10858,20867,1859,14784,14,33,16262,1324,4732,17743,27282,76,21286,104,96,35,20911,6053],"class_list":["post-3798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-production","tag-al","tag-canadian-pork","tag-capacity","tag-competitive","tag-cos","tag-cost","tag-cost-of-production","tag-down","tag-dust","tag-financial","tag-gh","tag-growth","tag-hog","tag-iron","tag-issues-and-trends-in-swine","tag-japan","tag-map","tag-maple-leaf","tag-mark","tag-market-trends","tag-mexico","tag-ness","tag-pig","tag-pigs","tag-pl","tag-pork","tag-pork-production","tag-prod","tag-production","tag-slaughter","tag-slaughter-capacity","tag-sow","tag-sows","tag-swine","tag-t","tag-use"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5895,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798\/revisions\/5895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}