Farmscape for October 28, 2016

Pork producers are being invited to showcase the product they produce by entering the 2016 Pork Quality Competition held as part of Prairie Livestock Expo in Winnipeg.
The 2016 edition of Prairie Livestock Expo, scheduled for December 14 in Winnipeg, will again feature the Pork Quality Competition.
Andrew Dickson, the General Manager of Manitoba Pork and Chair of Prairie Livestock Expo, says there's we typically get about 50 carcasses entered.

Clip-Andrew Dickson-Manitoba Pork:
The Quality Competition is a bit of fun event where the producers pick out what would be considered a high quality finished pig.
It's selected out and then we have them separately slaughtered and cut up and then the carcass quality is judged by a professional assessor.
It's a bit of a competition and so the results are posted and there's prizes awarded.
This year there's a cash prize plus a trip to World Pork Expo.
Usually the cash donation is made to a charity and so the various charitable organizations come forward and they're given part of the proceeds.
The meat, of course, is donated to the food banks in Manitoba.
It's of particular interest to the Hutterite Colonies and we get really good participation in this thing.
It's a lot of fun and people get into this.
In terms of the industry as a whole, it's a bit of a showcase to just show people we can produce high quality pork and people can get to see what a carcass looks like before it gets cut up into pork chops and roasts and that sort of thing.
We're very proud of our product and this is a way of showcasing it.

Dickson says it's interesting to see producers' opinions on what they thought was a good animal that walked around compared to once it actually gets processed.
For more information on Prairie Livestock Expo visit prairielivestockexpo.ca.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork