Farmscape for November 15, 2017

The Chair of Sask Pork says, while the province's pork industry has changed dramatically over 40 years, innovation and creativity of its people have remained the same.
40 years ago the Saskatchewan Pork Marketing Commission organized the first Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium.
Among the highlights of this year's event yesterday was a recognition of those producers in the province who have been in the business for 40 years and longer.
Saskatchewan Pork Development Board Chair Florian Possberg says a lot has changed since that first symposium.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
The industry has evolved quite a bit.
The role of the commission, we're now a development board, we represent producers on many levels for things like quality assurance, food safety, that sort of thing and so it is still a very important conference, the symposium, to bring producers together to discuss all the things that are happening in the industry and make the industry continue to grow and improve and evolve.
The Saskatchewan industry used to be pretty spread out across the province.
In 1977 we thought we had about 69 hundred producers across the province.
They would have produced just over a half a million hogs annually in total.
We had five processing plants around the province and so it was pretty diverse.
Today we have closer to 160 producers but we're producing four times the number of hogs, almost 2.2 million hogs per year so that's quite an evolution.

Possberg notes, what hasn't changed is the people, solid honest, hard working, innovative and creative.
He says we still see that today and we haven't reached the outer bounds of the innovation and creativity.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork