Manitoba Pork Council is the main sponsor of Food Cycle 2009, an event where Winnipeg cyclist Ken Livingstone is cycling almost 13 hundred kilometers through Manitoba along the Trans Canada Trail to raise financial support and public awareness of the work being done by Manitoba food banks.

The province-wide tour, which began last Friday, will stop in approximately 20 communities with supporters being invited to take part in pork barbecues at five of those stops.

Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch says the province's pork producers have a long standing tradition of supporting food banks and they can relate to the struggles faced by those who rely on the services provided.

Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork Council

We've got a lot of producers that can really understand what some of these people go through that can't afford to feed their families.

We have a lot of producers who understand that first hand.

We've been going through two years of fairly heavy losses and a lot of producers have had to put all the money they've got, all their savings, everything into trying to save their operations.

We have a lot of producers that are going to wonder how they're going to get from here to tomorrow just to be able to pay the bills and be able to afford to survive on their own and have their families survive.

In fact this down-turn has been so bad with some of the misconceptions that have went on with the H1N1, it's actually going to cause some producers to completely lose their entire livelihood and have to probably look at starting over in something else.

Mr Kynoch notes pork producers provide a high quality healthy product and last year they donated 151 thousand kilograms of pork to Manitoba's food banks.

He says it's important that people be aware there's also a severe economic crisis facing pork producers and he encourages the public to help out by buying pork.