In mid-April the federal government introduced a national swine herd reduction program to better balance supply and demand and help improve live hog prices.

The cull Breeding Swine program offers 225 dollars per culled animal to producers who agree to de-populate breeding barns and leave them empty for three years.

Manitoba Pork Council producers services specialist Jeff Clark says uptake in Manitoba has been fairly light.

Jeff Clark-Manitoba Pork Council

In Manitoba we've actually been kind of slow to pick it up compared to some of the other provinces.

In total we have close to about 16 thousand animals that have been applied for so that's just over four percent of our provincial herd.

Other provinces, just to give you a sense, Ontario picked it up by far the most with 45 thousand animals applied for and that's close to 11 percent of their herd.

But the majority of provinces are within about five to ten percent of their herd size but Manitoba being on the lower end.

Geographically in Manitoba, just from taking phone calls, it sounds like a number of producers are from the northwestern parts of agro-Manitoba near Riding Mountain but there's been producers applying to the program from all over the province.

The spread on the size of operations, it is mostly the smaller operations, less than 100 sows.

But we do have close to about 73 applicants in Manitoba and of those about 15 are larger than a 300 sow operation so the majority being less than 300, 200, 100 in many cases.

Clark notes the application window for the program ends August 31.

He points out producers who apply are not bound by the program and have the option of pulling out even if they have been approved.