Farmscape for June 3, 2020

Donald's Fine Foods is evaluating the feasibility of developing a cull sow processing facility in Moose Jaw.
Donald's Fine Foods is a family owned business that operates pork processing plants in Langley, B.C. and Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, a further processing plant in the Vancouver area and a distribution facility in B.C.
The company has launched a feasibility study to assess the viability of converting the former XL beef processing plant in Moose Jaw into a cull sow processing facility.
Neil Ketilson, the Industry Relations Manager with Donald's Fine Foods, says the study will evaluate the level of support for such a plant.

Clip-Neil Ketilson-Donald's Fine Foods:
We'd like to do the feasibility over a relatively short period of time, six to eight weeks.
What we're going to be doing is gauging the interest and support that we might expect from producers, that being whether or not they're willing to deliver the sows to the plant and to Donald's business as well as determining from the city and the province what kind of support programs might be out there.
When we speak of support programs, it could be financial, it could be regulatory, it could be a whole host of things, including support for labor and things like that.
It covers quite a few topics but, at the end of the day, we would like to have this done fairly quickly.
They want to take advantage of the summer months should they proceed and there's some work that needs to be done on the facility outside and, of course being in Saskatchewan, you have to take advantage of that otherwise you're into next year already.

Ketilson notes, there are no cull sow processing facilities in Canada so these animals are all transported to the U.S. for processing.
He says, so far, the reaction from producers, from the city and from the province has been positive so it looks like a real win-win.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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