The federal Cull Breeding Swine Program provides pork producers who agreed to de-populate breeding barns and leave them empty of breeding stock for a minimum of three years 225 dollars per culled animal.

The application deadline passed September 1, producers have until November 1 to complete their culls and until January 15 to submit supporting documentation.

Manitoba Pork Council producer services specialist Jeff Clark says the program seems to have worked well for those who have made use of it.

Jeff Clark-Manitoba Pork Council

For the most part producers I've spoken with have been real happy with the program.

These are guys that are maybe close to retirement age, wanting to get out of the industry anyway, older barns, smaller herds and the program worked real well for them.

Some of the other producers maybe that have larger operations, higher debt loads, this program simply didn't pay out enough for them.

There's a lot of people that were sitting on the fence for awhile, maybe wanting to go on the program but the three year time frame was just too long to keep that barn empty of breeding animals.

If you look at what our sow inventory was January 1, our overall breeding stock was just over 370 thousand and, if we went with the intent of the program was to reduce the herd by about 10 percent, we've only got to about five and a half percent, which would be about 20 thousand animals.

So it hasn't been as strong an uptake as it has been in other parts of the country.

I think that speaks to the strong industry we have in the province here.

We have two strong packers, close proximity to our American business partners so the uptake hasn't been quite as strong here.

Currently the program is retroactive to August 1, 2007 but, Clark points out, efforts are underway to have the retroactive start of the program pushed back to April 1, 2007.