As part of Tuesday's speech from the throne, the Manitoba government announced plans to enhance agricultural insurance programmes including introducing new products to assist sectors that have not traditionally been covered.

Among the new insurance products being discussed is an all peril mortality insurance package for the province's hog sector.

Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch notes pork producers have been working with a company out of England on the creation of such a programme.

Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork Council

It would cover things like maybe risk of disease.

If you got a new disease outbreak in your barn that wasn't there before and you lost a lot of livestock, it would cover that type of thing.

If this insurance would have been out earlier on, like when PRRS came into for example Ontario where producers lost a lot of money, it would have covered some of that.

We're hoping to see this, again we're just blue skying here, we haven't got much of this detail worked out but we want to see a shared insurance come out, something similar to Crop Insurance where the two levels of government cover some of it and producers cover some of it.

The producer will definitely have money in it, and again to take out some of the risk of mortality moving in, some unknown disease coming in and hitting your barn very hard.

We want to take some of those risks out, things that could actually basically bankrupt a producer.

The larger a package we can put together, for example a little bit of possibly suffocation or fire insurance or hydro outages, any of these type of things that we can include in it and get a nice fairly rounded package.

This way we can keep the cost as low as possible.

Mr Kynoch hopes to see something developed as early as next spring or next summer.

He notes there are other provinces investigating the development of an all peril mortality insurance package for the hog sector and he expects other jurisdictions to be paying close attention to what happens in Manitoba.