Hog farmers must 'wait it out' as Olymel plant closure threatens to back up pipeline

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Alberta hog farmers will face some difficult choices if the Red Deer pork processing facility at the centre of a major COVID-19 outbreak cannot reopen promptly.

On Monday, Quebec-based Olymel announced it will close its Red Deer plant for an “indefinite period” because of the outbreak, which has resulted in 326 cases of COVID-19 among the facility’s employees as of Monday. One worker — a man in his 30s with no pre-existing health conditions — has died from the disease.

The plant is the second-largest pork processing facility in Western Canada, second only to the Maple Leaf plant in Brandon, Man. Its 1,850 employees process approximately 50,000 pigs per week. Those pigs now have nowhere to go, said Darcy Fitzgerald, executive director of Alberta Pork.

“Two weeks is about the limit for how long these pigs can stay at home, and then we really run into problems,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re in a bit of a conundrum, to say the least, while we wait it out.”

Unlike cattle ranchers, who may have extra pens in the feed yard and can put animals on diets that are designed to slow their growth until slaughter capacity becomes available, hog producers raise their pigs in heated barns with separate areas for animals of different sizes. New piglets are always being born, so farmers quickly run out of space if the production pipeline suddenly grinds to a halt.

In the absence of a market for full-grown animals, farmers may try to sell their smaller pigs to a buyer with the capacity to care for them, but they then lose out on the money they would have made off of those animals. And holding onto their pigs for even an extra week or two means a significant increase in feed costs.