Ontario hog farmers can now apply for AgriRecovery toward feed costs for hogs held back from sale when certain pork packers went into COVID-19-induced slowdowns.
Agricorp, the province’s ag program delivery agency, on Nov. 25 announced the Canada-Ontario COVID-19 2020 Hog Maintenance Feed Initiative, which started effective Nov. 6 and will run through to March 31, 2021.
Hog farmers are eligible to apply if they owned market-ready hogs that were intended for processing, but were instead held back from shipping due to a “reduction in processing capacity at an affected processor.”
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Hogs must have been scheduled for processing at one of two affected processors and instead held back from shipping for a minimum of eight days.
Eligible hogs must have been shipped either to Olymel’s federally inspected plants outside the province, or to Weston Abattoir, a provincially licensed facility at Maidstone, Ont., southeast of Windsor, between April 5 and June 13, 2020.
Hogs enrolled under the program are eligible for payment at a rate of 95 cents per animal per day, minus a seven-day deductible, to a maximum $28.50 per hog.
Hogs enrolled in the program must be fed “at a premise or premises located in Ontario” and their ownership must not have changed during the enrollment period. Enrolled animals must also have been sold for processing for human consumption at the end of their enrollment period.
Any further intakes for the program will be posted on the Agricorp website. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
