Manitoba could be expanding its hog industry, with the potential for more hog barns being built in the province.

Manitoba Pork general manager Andrew Dickson says thanks to the province's decision to allow barns to be built with a two-cell settlement for manure instead of the previously required anaerobic digesters, the opportunity is here. While this change in regulation already happened last year, Dickson thinks the industry in a good place for expansion.

"When we look forward, we see relatively lower grain prices compared to what they have been. We see interest rates at all-time lows. Demand for pork seems to be holding and world demand seems to be increasing with all these new trade agreements coming into place," he says. "Producers are starting to say to themselves, 'Do we build or don't we build?'"

Dickson says current producers are considering expanding operations through new barns, while there's also some interest for new producers to enter the industry at this time — although right now Dickson says it's impossible to know how many new barns this could mean.

"We do know, though, that we're short about a million finished pigs for our processing plants [in Manitoba]," he says, "we do know we're going to need a significant number of new finisher barns to be able to produce those pigs to bring our plants to competitive processing capacity with our counterparts in the United States."

Dickson says the expansion to fill these gaps will likely take five to 10 years. He says Manitoba Pork will be guiding the project along with financial help from Farm Credit Canada, and encourages producers to talk to them in moving forward with expansions.