Farmscape for July 18, 2011   (Episode 3625)

Improvements planned for the Neepawa, Manitoba based Hylife Foods hog slaughtering plant will allow expanded slaughter capacity and additional value added processing.

Last week the federal government announced Hylife Foods, formerly Springhill Farms, a subsidiary of Hylife, will receive 10 million dollars under the Slaughter Improvement Program for improvements to its Neepawa hog slaughtering plant including expansion of the cooler and cutting areas and the purchase of new equipment.

Denis Vielfaure, the Chief Operating Officer of Hylife, says the upgrades will expand slaughter capacity and allow more value to be added to the plant's products.

Clip-Denis Vielfaure-Hylife:
Our goal when we bought the facility about 40 months ago was to diversify the product mix and just not to be pigeon holed.

At that time we were basically in the frozen international market, 90 plus percent frozen international market so a lot of the upgrades have been done to improve the facility to be able to do fresh product and also to value add to that fresh product which means doing a lot more deboning of primal pieces to sell to our customers.

Also at the same a large focus has been to export fresh chilled, specifically to the Japanese market and the Korean market and some Asian markets.

Today we've maxxed out at about 900 thousand hogs annually.

With these upgrade it's going to give us the opportunity to have some more through-put, it's going to permit us to have about 50 percent more through-put bringing us close to the 1.4 million hogs per year.

Vielfaure notes Hylife Foods sources hogs from within the Hylife production system, from the former owners of the facility and from some independent producers.

He says the bulk of the additional capacity will be filled by hogs from within the Hylife system that are now being processed at other facilities.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council