The Springhill Farms pork processing plant at Neepawa, Man. has finalized an agreement with the town to allow for upgrades to the packer’s wastewater treatment plant.
The upgrades, if completed by early April 2010 as planned, could allow Springhill to expand its processing capacity to nearly 1.4 million hogs per year, up from about 900,000 currently.
Speaking Friday on the hog industry-sponsored radio program Farmscape, Denis Vielfaure, vice-president of projects and environmental affairs for Springhill’s parent firm, hog production firm Hytek, said renovations to the treatment plant are already underway and should be completed by early April next year.
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Hytek, Canada’s largest hog production firm, bought the Springhill Farms facility in February last year from a group of Hutterite Brethren colonies in the province.
At that time, Vielfaure said on Farmscape, it was found that the packing plant’s wastewater treatment facility needed upgrading. The company began working with the Town of Neepawa, about 75 km northeast of Brandon, toward development of a “state of the art wastewater treatment plant that will be able to process all of the effluent for the full licensed capacity of the processing plant.”
The new facility will more than meet provincial standards for effluent treatment, Vielfaure said on the program. The current regulatory regime, he said, calls for a 15:1 nitrogen and phosphorus treatment, as per the province’s strategy to reduce nutrient loading into Lake Winnipeg.
Hytek, based at la Broquerie, Man., about 15 km east of Steinbach, bills itself as the seventh biggest pig production firm in North America, with holdings in Canada, the U.S. and China.
