“This is more than a building; it is a new home and anchor for HyLife that we hope will become a community landmark,” said Grant Lazaruk, HyLife’s president and CEO, in an Aug. 28 news release.

“After several years envisioning, planning and building, we look forward to settling in and collaborating in this world-class space.”

Local news reports showed the Aug. 25 celebration attended by Steinbach Mayor Earl Funk, Provencher MP Ted Falk and Steinbach MLA Kelvin Goertzen, among other dignitaries.

“What a historic moment for our community, as we celebrate the opening of the brand new HyLife Headquarters [sic], right here in Steinbach,” Funk said in the news release.

Prior to its move into the new building, HyLife had employees in several satellite offices, including various locations in the company’s hometown of La Broquerie, a spokesperson for the company said.

There are roughly 175 employees working in the new headquarters, in logistics, animal health, technical support and human resources.

The company has also touted the building for its eco-friendly features, citing its almost 11,000-square-foot south-facing wall of reflective ‘low E’ glass, designed to let in natural light while reflecting heat. Energy-efficient walls and electric vehicle charging stations are other highlights.

“More than two-thirds of the tradespeople that built our new HyLife headquarters are directly from the Steinbach area. We are proud of this rural collaboration,” said Kevin Barkman, HyLife’s senior vice-president of infrastructure and environmental affairs, in the news release.

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There’s been a torrent of bad news in the meat sector in the last two months. Tyson Foods reported its first quarterly loss since 2009; HyLife’s processing plant in Windom, Minn., declared bankruptcy; Smithfield Foods is closing 40 sow farms in Missouri; Olymel Foods announced permanent closure of its Vallée-Jonction hog plant in Quebec; and despite rising sales, Maple Leaf Foods reported a loss in the first quarter of 2023.

“Everybody’s feeling the pinch, and these sorts of restructurings are a function of the economic challenges that we have right now,” says Paul Marchand, senior risk management analyst with H@ms Marketing.

WHY IT MATTERS: Uncertainty about input costs, demand and price are making profits more difficult to achieve for many livestock producers.

Marchand singled out HyLife’s Windom plant closure as an example.

“It was purely market conditions that drove that decision,” he says. “It talked about an inflationary environment, a high-cost environment, and just difficult global economic challenges to navigate.

“The plant was losing $6 million a month, according to their bankruptcy filings. This is all a function of the economic conditions that we’re in.”

Marchand says those conditions developed as a result of policy decisions made during the pandemic.

“You can’t disrupt supply chains by asking everybody to restrict their movement. That’s going to create challenges,” he says. “And then you pump a bunch of money into the economy on both sides of the border because you’ve asked people to stay home.”

He doesn’t label that as right or wrong in terms of health policy.

“I’m not going to get into that, but it was economically very disruptive,” he says. “We are feeling the fallout of those decisions that were made in 2020, and we’ll continue to do so until we see a new normal develop.”

Marchand says that new normal won’t be realized until the effects of this inflationary, high interest rate environment are settled, but the timing of that is hard to predict.

“There is a policy lag with any of these decisions so we’re just waiting (for) the impacts of the policy to kind of catch up,” he says. “The good news is, we’ve seen a slowdown in demand and a turnaround in inflation rates. While I don’t think that we see an interest rate rise for the remainder of the year, they almost certainly are not going to cut.”

Current times signal a market correction, he says. The excess money supply caused an inflationary bump and extra dollars in circulation increased demand for higher-cost proteins, which drove up all meat prices.

Then the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to bring inflation under control. Companies that were over-leveraged are now feeling the pinch with higher debt-servicing costs. For the same reasons, consumers had to tighten their belts so their taste for high-priced proteins diminished.

“It’s not like you can say, ‘I don’t feel like paying my line of credit today’,” says Marchand. “But I can very easily buy ground pork instead of a loin or ground beef instead of a steak.”

The pork sector is being hit hardest by these market forces. When Maple Leaf reported its first-quarter loss, it blamed “pork market headwinds” in addition to inflationary pressures.

When demand for pork rose in 2021, the industry began producing more pigs. Now that consumers are cutting back, there’s an oversupply.

“As prices go up, sometimes producers start to increase production, perhaps a little too early,” said Stephen Heckbert, executive director of the Canadian Pork Council. “Sometimes we outpace market demand with production. And that’s the cycle we’re in at this moment.”

But Heckbert says the situation is largely self-correcting.

“There’s no perfect world where we can match the market exactly. We’re invariably either too high or too low. When we’re too low, prices go up.”

Heckbert is encouraged by recent developments in overseas markets, where roughly half of Canadian pork goes.

“We’re back in China now. The Philippines is a growing market for us now. As more people enter the middle class, pork consumption is going to grow.”

The price of hogs is determined by the U.S. domestic market, the destination for only 20 per cent of Canadian pork. So, while demand for Canadian pork in overseas markets has a negligible effect on the price producers get for hogs, it does ensure there are markets for Canadian pork when the U.S. market is oversaturated.

The beef sector has been somewhat insulated from economic pressures because producers reduced herd sizes in the face of high feed prices after several years of drought. Demand has never caught up. Now, with consumer spending choked by high interest rates and rising prices, demand will inevitably fall.

“Inflationary pressures have been a challenge for the last couple years from the input side of things in the beef space,” says Manitoba Beef Producers general manager Carson Callum, adding there is still a strong outlook for cattle prices.

“Obviously there are market headwinds that continue to be at play, and producers are monitoring those.”

He recommends that producers take advantage of risk-management programs like livestock price insurance while prices are high and coverage is favourable.

Risk management programs are also an important tool for pork producers, says Manitoba Pork general manager Cam Dahl.

He recommends that producers look into risk management tools where there’s forward contracting or forward pricing, on the feed side as well as the product side.

“That’s not always the perfect solution, but in dealing with that volatility right now, those tools are becoming more and more valuable.”

Dahl says volatility extends to the farm level.

“Whether it’s farrow to finish, if you’re just producing isoweans, or if you’re a nursery or a finisher, everybody’s losing money right now.

“Grain farmers will tell you their prices are falling, but we’re still seeing some of the highest feed prices we’ve seen in history,” says Dahl. “Unfortunately, right now, the price of a hog is falling faster than the price of feed.”

While things remain uncertain, Dahl says he doesn’t expect to see any plant closures in Manitoba.

“I’m confident that there is really a Manitoba advantage to having the processing industry here,” he says. “I don’t see that under threat.”

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Weaning piglets was hard on the back: bend down, pick up a 12-pound piglet, vaccinate it, bend to put it down again, this time sorted by sex. Rinse and repeat hundreds of times, sometimes for hours.

Surely a company with the resources of the Manitoba-based pork giant could help develop a better way? As it turns out, it could.

Why it matters: HyLife Foods expects fewer aching backs after barns are set up with new piglet weaning ramps.

The request made its way to HyLife’s continuous improvement team, a segment of the company devoted to supporting on-the-ground solutions based on farmer feedback. Seeing its value, the engineers and design team got to work.

[RELATED] China pork output hits highest in eight years

Over the next months, a number of prototype weaning ramps were tested. The result has since been installed in seven barns, and every remaining facility in HyLife’s network is now asking for one of their own, according to Lyle Loewen, senior vice-president of the company’s farm division.

“It’s actually really caught on. People are appreciating the way it makes their work life better,” he said.

The ramp raises piglets to a comfortable height, allowing staff to work without bending over.

“The ramp can be adjusted to the optimal height for our employees,” Loewen said. “In other words, if it’s a group of shorter people working on it, it can be a lower ramp.”

Piglets are herded in groups of 20 to 25 into an inclining chute and into the initial segment of the ramp. Once all animals are at workable height, a pulley-operated gate closes behind them. A similar gate on the other end of the segment is then opened, animals are moved into the final area of the apparatus and the first section is again closed. Animals are then vaccinated and slid down a ‘male’ or ‘female’ slide.

That middle segment is important for workflow, Loewen noted. The design of the ramp allows employees to move the next group into position while the first group is being vaccinated and sorted.

“What happened in one of the original prototypes was they just had one holding area, so the piglets came in and, once they were vaccinated and slid out according to their sex, then [employees] had to wait for another group to come in,” he said. “Now there’s no waiting time.”

Accolades

The invention has won its share of second looks from the industry.

In mid-January, two sow farm employees, Robert Lafrenière and Barak Doell, took home the F.X. Aherne Prize for Innovative Pork Production from the 2023 Banff Pork Seminar because of the ramp.

The company also got an unsolicited nod from animal behaviour scientist and animal handling system designer Temple Grandin. She was touring a HyLife facility near Steinbach when the weaning ramp caught her eye, Loewen said.

The professor from Colorado State University went on the record, saying the design should be a sector standard.

“This innovative system should be in every sow farm for vaccinating weaned piglets…I can’t say enough good things about it. It should go industry-wide,” Grandin said.

“I was amazed how well those little pigs used the ramp; that’s the kind of stuff that makes handling easier.”

Piglets do have to endure a slide at the end of the process, which Loewen admitted he had initial questions about. But the system has been praised for lowering animal stress as well as employee health.

Animals are minimally handled, which reduces joint stress, the company has said. Loewen also noted the slide gradient is gentle and a comfort pad is placed in the landing zone.

“It’s not like a slide in a park where a kid really comes racing down,” he said.

The invention may speed up vaccination, since the process involves less walking and fewer pauses for back stretches.

*Update: A location reference to the HyLife facility that Temple Grandin visited was changed.

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La Broquerie, Man.-based HyLife announced last week it has bought a 75 per cent stake in Taylor Corp.’s Prime Pork, a packing and processing operation at Windom, Minnesota, about 200 km southwest of Minneapolis.

Taylor Corp. set up Prime Pork in 2016 at Windom’s former PM Beef packing plant, which had closed the previous year. The renovated plant now employs about 660 people and has capacity to process about 1.2 million hogs per year on a single shift, HyLife said.

The deal “will allow us to expand our operations into the United States” and will increase HyLife’s total processing capacity to 3.2 million hogs per year, HyLife CEO Grant Lazaruk said in a release May 22. The deal’s dollar figures weren’t released.

“Plants in both Canada and the U.S. will strengthen our supply chain, giving us further diversity in our operations to better serve our customers around the world,” Lazaruk said.

Specifically, combining the two operations for product flow from both the U.S. and Canada will allow for “additional marketing opportunity to customers who only carry pork products from either the U.S. or Canada,” Prime Pork said in a separate release.

Taylor’s Prime Pork and Comfrey Farm businesses also include hog farming operations, in which the company owns the pig inventory and contracts with third parties for barn facilities, feed and management.

Those contract operators today raise about 300,000 feeder hogs per year to market weight and Prime Pork sources other hogs from third party suppliers.

Privately held Taylor Corp. owns various agribusinesses as well as Minneapolis’ StarTribune newspaper and Minnesota’s NBA and WNBA basketball teams. “With this new partner and leadership, I am confident this agreement will be great for the community, employees and area producers,” Glen Taylor said in Prime Pork’s release.

“Prime Pork’s location in southern Minnesota provides an abundance of resources, securing hog supply and the other raw materials required to operate a processing facility efficiently.”

Manitoba hogs

HyLife also announced May 5 it had bought the hog farming operations of ProVista from its Manitoba owners, Harold and Arthur Rempel, for an undisclosed sum.

Steinbach, Man.-based ProVista is today billed as “one of Canada’s largest independent hog farming operations,” with hog production sites in Manitoba’s southeast and Red River Valley regions and in the RM of WestLake northwest of Portage la Prairie, as well as in southeastern Saskatchewan.

The assets going to HyLife in that deal include a boar stud operation and 37,000 sows in 12 sow barns, along with six nursery and six finishing barns producing up to a million hogs per year, employing 252 people.

The ProVista farms are “in close proximity to HyLife’s current operations,” HyLife said, allowing for “strategic synergies, as the newly acquired farms will be added to HyLife’s existing infrastructure.”

“We have a long working relationship with ProVista and look forward to building on all the hard work that they have done,” HyLife’s Lazaruk said May 5. “This acquisition enables HyLife to expand our production team and secure hog supply to facilitate future growth.”

“We are confident this sale represents an opportunity for our employees to grow with a global leader in the pork industry, and it fulfills our farming business aspirations,” the Rempels said in the same release.

The Rempels’ other businesses include Proline Pork Marketing, Horizon Livestock and Poultry Supply, ProVista Feeds, PVS Transport and Quarry Oaks Golf Course.

HyLife has been in aggressive expansion mode in recent years, expanding its hog processing plants at Neepawa, Man. and at Salvatierra in central Mexico, building and buying additional finishing barns and putting up a new feed mill at Killarney, Man. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The tongue-in-cheek name references the Great Train Robbery nine years earlier, when a Royal Mail train from Glasgow to London was relieved of 2.6 million pounds while in transit by a gang of proper, old-school, British villains out of an Ealing Studios gangster film.

The namesake grain robbery was, strictly speaking, legal, and magnitudes larger. It’s the tale of the co-ordinated purchase of 10 million tons of U.S. grain by the Soviet Union, which happened quietly and stealthily, preventing a price run-up.

The Soviets, the story goes, went to see several suppliers, giving each the impression they were negotiating exclusively with them. Once the deals were sewn up, the Soviets apparently then returned to the same suppliers asking for a bit more at the same price, which all the companies were happy to supply. Suddenly, however, it became apparent that the Soviets had bought out most of the available supply.

The impact on grain markets was swift and sure, with a run-up of grain prices. Over a 10-month period, soybeans rose from US$3.31 a bushel to US$12.90 a bushel. Food prices around the world rose 50 per cent in 1973.

One of the great ironies of the situation is that a group of swashbuckling capitalists were handed their hats by the Soviet communists, who taught them a thing or two about business.

One of the results of this Soviet strategy was that new rules were struck requiring large grain sales in the U.S. to be reported to the USDA.

It’s not the only example of a market strategy that many claimed bordered on manipulation. Just a few years later our own Canadian Wheat Board stood accused of a reverse grain robbery, in 1977.

That year the CWB saw big crops coming and correctly anticipated a price drop, dumping close to four million bushels on the trade, which was, in the words of one observer “… successful, but controversial.”

Both of these examples illuminate the reality of markets where knowledge, especially knowledge nobody else has, can become power and then money.

Through this lens, the ongoing acquisition of pork companies by Asian interests takes on a whole new significance. The largest and highest-profile deal came in 2013, when China’s Shuanghui Group (now renamed the WH Group) purchased Smithfield foods in 2013 for US$4.72 billion, more than its market value.

When the deal was struck, the Chinese company didn’t just acquire a meat-packing company. It acquired a vertically integrated juggernaut that controlled pork production, genetics and processing. The deal also, incidentally, made the new parent company the largest foreign owner of U.S. farmland.

Many speculated it was a move to buy production to feed demand in China, but Fortune magazine noted at the time that the numbers simply didn’t add up. While Smithfield was and is a big pork producer and processor, its total output amounted to just three per cent of annual pork consumption in China.

The magazine instead suggested the real motivation was looking forward to the environmental limits of China itself, strained in recent years by runaway development.

“It is really about owning access to America’s safe farmland and clean water supplies,” wrote author Minxin Pei, in a June 2013 column.

As Alexis Stockford writes in her cover story in our May 16 issue, similar speculation is surrounding a deal by Thai company CPF Foods to purchase HyLife.

Some suggest it might be the pork equivalent of the Great Grain Robbery, as African swine fever promises to play hob with China’s domestic pork supply. So far, it has been found in every province there and resists control efforts.

Agriculture lender Rabobank has suggested there could be an unprecedented reduction in the Chinese swine herd of 30 per cent and a doubling of pork imports there in the next year. That could cause pork prices to launch to the stratosphere, positioning the new buyers nicely.

Others however, including those inside the deal, say it was under consideration well before the ASF issue was raised. CPF Foods has long been interested in expanding into North America, they say.

Much like the Smithfield deal, they’re acquiring a company with a significant production footprint here in Canada, and operations in the U.S., Mexico and China. It’s a sophisticated vertically integrated operation and no doubt made an attractive acquisition.

As at least one pork sector analyst noted in the story, in some ways it’s an endorsement of the direction of the sector.

Globalization is the future of pork, it would seem, and the fact it’s come here to Manitoba should be no surprise.

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The company announced a deal with Thailand-based exporter Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CPF) for 50.1 of the company’s stock April 22. The $498-million deal adds HyLife to the conglomerate’s list of companies, which span 17 countries and include hogs, chickens, ducks, livestock feed, aquaculture and restaurants, Reuters reported.

Why it matters: One of Manitoba’s major pork producers and processors is joining one of Thailand’s biggest names in agriculture.

That’s in addition to a 2012 deal which saw Japanese company Itochu Corp. acquire more than 30 per cent of the company. In CFP’s release announcing the deal it said Itochu would now own the remaining portion of the company.

HyLife president Claude Veilfaure touted the deal as a good fit for CPF and the company he runs.

“It is the third-biggest pork producer in the world and it is a family-owned company,” HyLife president Claude Vielfaure said.

“Their values are extremely strong, community based, employee based, very similar to the culture of HyLife,” he said.

Both companies are vertically integrated, with the interests ranging from feed to breeding, animal production and meat processing.

There are no plans to shift processing focus away from Neepawa due to the deal, Vielfaure said, and the plant in western Manitoba will remain the centre of the company’s processing.

The Neepawa plant completed a round of renovations last year which doubled cutting floor room, added advancements such as an overhead conveyor deboning system and water jet cutter and came as the latest in a line of expansion projects, ranging from new barns to new feed mills.

“We’ve invested heavily in Manitoba through the years, opening our new cut floor and $176-million investment in Neepawa, Manitoba, over the last number of years,” Vielfaure said. “That is certainly one component of why this company is investing in us, our world-class facility that we already have in Manitoba.”

HyLife currently owns processing facilities in both Can­ada and Mexico.

Vielfaure did not outline any further expansion projects in Western Canada, but said the deal was made in expectation of HyLife’s continued growth in North America.

CPF, meanwhile, has said that the acquisition will expand its footprint in markets like Japan and North America, Reuters reported.

HyLife CEO Grant Lazaruk called the deal a “win win” for both companies, as well as Manitoba’s agriculture sector.

HyLife Foods expects to expand its own export reach through the deal. The company already exports heavily to markets like Japan and China.

“With CPF based out of Thailand and all of its connections and its ownership in different companies around the world, certainly (that) will open doors for us,” Vielfaure said.

An April 22 release said that CPF exports to 30 countries for a reach of four billion people.

“Through this agreement, we will build on the success of our growing pork business and brands to our customers globally, including our fresh chilled pork products to Japan which we proudly grow and process right here in Manitoba,” Lazaruk said.

The deal has been in the works since late summer 2018, according to the president of HyLife Foods. The companies expect the deal will clear international regulatory authorities and close by the third quarter in 2019.

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The province announced Sept. 14 that the pork giant will join the companies and projects singled out for TIF, or tax increment financing.

Governments most commonly turn to TIF to jump-start economic development and private sector investment by promising to return a share of the tax revenue generated by that capital investment. Alternately, governments might slate a part of that new tax revenue for improvements in a given area, for example, sidewalks or new infrastructure surrounding a TIF-supported project.

“The tax, pre-development, is still paid, not recoupable,” Premier Brian Pallister said at the Sept. 14 announcement in Neepawa. “The levy on improvement is incented by returning it to the proponent for reinvestment.

“Simply put, the idea is to incent the investment of private capital into our economy,” he added.

In the case of Hylife Ltd., the province has thrown TIF support behind the company’s aggressive $176-million expansion plan. The company wrapped up two years of expansion projects this year, president Claude Vielfaure announced in April, including a new feed mill in the Municipality of Killarney-Turtle Mountain and a 100,000-square-foot cutting floor expansion in their main Neepawa facility. The company is also expecting to complete four new hog barns in western Manitoba through the winter months.

The TIF support will be on top of the $2 million already provided under Growing Forward 2 for the expansion.

“As a business in Manitoba and as a business that started in Manitoba, we’ve kept growing in Manitoba,” Vielfaure said, “but it’s so important to have a government that supports business, supports industry and supports rural Manitoba, and that’s what the government today has shown.”

About $105 million of the $176-million expansion went to the Neepawa upgrades, Vielfaure said. That facility now employs about 1,300 people.

Vielfaure says the company expects to start reaping the benefits from the expansion in the next few years.

“Obviously when you do these major expansions, there’s a startup time where you’re just making sure you’re tweaking everything, making sure things are working properly, and now we’re starting to work on getting the added value that we will get because of the investment we’ve done in Neepawa,” he said.

Pallister, as well as local government and provincial Minister of Agriculture Ralph Eichler praised the company for its growth, community involvement and job creation, something that last year earned it an Employer Awards for Newcomer Employment nod from the federal government. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada noted the company for its efforts in settling staff to the area from overseas through the temporary foreign worker and permanent sponsorship programs. The company has also been a regular name on Canadian Business’s 50 best-managed companies.

“Hylife, of course, has created spinoff opportunities of amazing proportions, really,” Pallister said, citing ongoing construction and maintenance jobs created by the company’s projects.

The announcement comes after similar announcements by the Pallister government. On Sept. 10, the province announced up to $11.95 million in TIF to the True North Square Public Plaza, including the residential tower and surrounding street, sidewalk and skywalk projects, in Winnipeg.

At the same time, the province promised TIF support to a planned residential tower connected to the Sutton Place Hotel.

Municipal Relations Minister Jeff Wharton argued that TIF projects, “protect taxpayers against the risk of losses when developments are delayed or anticipated tax revenues do not materialize,” according to a Sept. 10 release.

In 2016, CBC reported on concerns that the City of Winnipeg was leaning too heavy on TIF and tying up too much future tax revenue to bolster projects at the time.

Pallister dismissed suggestions that the province’s current spate of TIF announcement might run into similar concerns.

“This is not an uncommonly used tool and it’s one that we’re using carefully to make sure that we’re incenting investments in sustainable things that will stay here, we hope,” he said.

Similar announcements have so far largely been limited to projects in Winnipeg, although Pallister said there would be more support for rural-based projects in the coming weeks.

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The company has completed two years’ worth of upgrades, HyLife announced April 3, a move that HyLife president Claude Vielfaure says will lengthen their product’s shelf life and quality as well as doubling space on the cut floor.

“An example of that is a water jet cutter,” Vielfaure said. “So we’ll have a machine that’s going to be cutting meat with water without employees touching the meat at all and so that’s new technology that just is going to be better.”

Vielfaure used similar reasoning for the new overhead conveyor deboning system. The system will hang carcasses in front of employees to cut, allowing for less contact between the employee and the meat.

“It’s the first one that’s been installed in North America and, essentially, instead of cutting meat horizontally, it’s actually going to be hanging on this machine going in front of our employees who are going to be cutting through one cut at a time,” he said. “Essentially what happens is we’re hardly touching the meat. We’re using gravity to be able to do some stuff.”

HyLife has retired the old cutting floor now that the new facility is complete, and Vielfaure says that area will be converted to offices, cafeteria space, washrooms, and other amenities.

The company expects the 100,000-square-foot expansion to be fully operational by the second week of April.

The federal and provincial governments pitched in $2 million to help fund the expansion under Growing Forward 2.

Period of growth

HyLife first announced the $176-million project in 2016, one of what has become a string of expansion projects for the company.

The company’s new feed mill, which began construction in Killarney last year, is expected to be up and running by July 2018. Likewise, the company plans to keep expanding its hog barn base. HyLife markets itself as a farm-to-fork company and thus produces many of the animals it processes and ships.

Two new barns went up last year in an effort to keep up with processing capacity.

Vielfaure says another four barns are in the approval process this year.

The company estimates the feed mill and new barns have added 165 jobs to its payroll.

Another HyLife feed mill also opened in the RM of Hanover in 2016.

Welcome news

Andrew Dickson, general manager of the Manitoba Pork Council, called the upgrades a “significant improvement in the productivity of the plant.”

While the company is largely self-contained, Dickson maintained that any growth in pig production or processing capacity can only be positive for the industry and argued that the Manitoba economy in general will see a boost.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” he said. “Brand new equipment, state of the art, some of it, (they’re) the first plant in Canada to use some of this stuff.”

Dickson noted that average production capacity and efficiency will rise in the province with the upgraded plant.

“They’re doing very good in the Japanese market and this will be very good for the industry as a whole,” he said. “They’ve also got a significant number of people who contract with them, so they will be able to be competitive in the marketplace with those producers who ship to them as well.”

HyLife Foods has become a well-known exporter of fresh chilled pork to international markets. In particular, it has gained a reputation for its growth in Asian markets such as Japan, China and South Korea. The company has also pointed to growth from the Mexican market.

Neepawa mayor, Adrian de Groot, welcomed the long-awaited upgrades and credited the company for drawing jobs to the region.

“Neepawa has been a partner with HyLife since its beginnings here and we look forward to continued positive relationships in the future,” de Groot said. “As one of the major employers in this area, HyLife continues to add diversity and opportunity to not only Neepawa, but also the surrounding communities. There is a vibrancy that is felt throughout the region.”

The company has earned a reputation for bringing in and settling foreign workers, getting a nod from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada last year with the 2017 Employer Awards for Newcomer Employment.

Vielfaure did not rule out future projects, but added that the focus now is completing those that are still in the works.

“This project will make our plant go to full double shift, so we’ll be at maximum capacity with what we have there,” he said.

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Paul Vielfaure died suddenly Nov. 23 at age 59, his family reported in a brief obituary in Winnipeg and Steinbach newspapers this week.

Radio-Canada reported Tuesday that Vielfaure had died in Phoenix, Arizona. While Vielfaure was known to have lived with multiple sclerosis for over 20 years, the French-language public broadcaster said his death was “not attributable” to MS.

Vielfaure, his brothers Denis and Claude and partner Don Janzen launched the hog production company then known as VL4/Janzen, based at La Broquerie, Man., east of Steinbach, in 1994.

Paul Vielfaure retired nine years later from the company, and from his position as a delegate to the Manitoba Pork Council.

By 2008 VL4 had changed its name to Hytek, taken on new partners Grant Lazaruk and Henry Van de Velde and purchased the Springhill Farms pork processing plant at Neepawa, Man., about 75 km northeast of Brandon.

The hog company, which rebranded as HyLife in 2011 and remains headquartered at La Broquerie, today produces over 1.4 million hogs per year and has expanded its hog production business into the U.S. and China.

HyLife’s Neepawa packing plant doubled its processing capacity and now handles about 6,500 hogs per day, supplying pork to domestic and export markets. — AGCanada.com Network

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