Farm Credit Canada released its Agriculture Exports report at Canadian Western Agribition on Tuesday.

Chief Economist JP Gervais says the report looked at where we are shipping our commodities and where we have the potential to diversify further. 

Looking at the Livestock sector specifically beef and pork, he says there are some really great opportunities to diversify our markets.

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is going to actually open up even more doors for us to export and grow our presence in the Japanese market and we’ve got a trade deal with South Korea as well. If you look at our export presence in South Korea, it's been lower than what you would normally expect. So, there's an opportunity I believe to diversify a little bit more, maybe lower our exports to the U-S and try to find that added value in Asian markets.”

Gervais says while there’s a lot of discussion around plant-based products – there’s still strong demand for protein sources like beef and pork.

“In the data, we find that there is still a very strong demand for both the domestic and foreign markets. So, I'm absolutely optimistic about the future of beef and pork....red meat in general. Just because the fact is, the data is pretty clear export markets want a lot of beef and a lot of pork.”