Spruce Woods Colony took top honours at this year’s pork quality luncheon, with Wellwood Colony finishing runner-up, followed by Riverside Colony — the winners of last year’s event.

Sunnyside Colony and Boundary Lane Colony rounded out the top five.

The competition remains a highlight, even for experienced entrants, said Jason Hofer of Wellwood Colony.

The luncheon, organized in partnership with the Manitoba Pork Council, Assiniboine College, East 40 Packers and Blue Water Wash, pairs a pork-focused meal with a quality competition judged on the animals entered by producers.

As has become tradition for the event, winners also designated a charity of their choice to share in the prize money.

“We’ve won quite a few shows in the past, so we always have fun at it,” Hofer said. “It’s a good experience, it’s for charity, and that’s mainly the reason we like entering, because it’s a charitable cause.”

Wellwood Colony chose to support the Brandon Regional Health Centre this year.

“They’ve been asking for some funds they need to complete that new facility they got there, and they’ve asked for charity, so we decided we’re going to donate to them. We’ve donated lots to them before,” he said.

While a first-place finish is always the goal, placing second still feels like a win, Hofer added.

“You always want to be the winner, but you can’t always win. We’ve won our fair share of first places, and runner-up is good too.”

Producers choose charity

A key part of the event is its charitable impact, said Kristen Laing Breemersch, manager of operations and acting general manager with the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba, the organizing body behind the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair.

This year’s selected charities included the Brandon Regional Health Centre Foundation, HEART (a Hutterite-led underwater search and rescue group) and several rural hospitals, including those in Neepawa, Souris and Portage la Prairie.

Prize money is split between producers and their chosen charities, with at least half directed to the selected organization for top-placing entries. Some winners go a step further.

This year, Laing Breemersch said, the grand champion winners donated the entire prize.

From farm to community tables

The pork itself is also put to use locally. The top two carcasses are sent to Assiniboine College to support culinary training, while the remaining product is processed and distributed to food banks and community groups with help from East 40 Packers.

Giving back is what makes the event stand out, Laing Breemersch said.

“It’s one of the aspects of our winter fair that is quite dear to me, to be able to give back to our community and give back to the people that are in need,” she said. “We couldn’t do it without the generosity and support of all of these colonies.”

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The rodeo event was on the schedule leading up to the week-long fair in Brandon, but was pulled at the last minute by the sport’s sanctioning body, the Canadian Cowboys Association (CCA), fair officials said.

In an April 1 release, the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba (the organizing force behind the RMWF), said the association’s decision was “due to external requirements that could not be met within the necessary timelines.”

Clarke Swain, exhibition vice-president and horse show chair, said the issue centred on proof of vaccine requirements.

The RMWF’s proof of vaccination form, shared with the Co-operator, requires a horse arriving at the fair to be “enrolled in a regular and consistent program” vaccinating against equine herpesviruses one and four and equine influenza, “with the most recent booster being within six (6) months (+21 days grace period) but not 7 days prior to arrival of the competition start date.”

Swain said there was confusion on what that timeline meant, and miscommunication about what was needed between the exhibition and the Canadian Cowboys Association.

“[Participants] automatically thought that as long as it wasn’t within the seven days, that they could come,” Swain said.

But the exhibition follows Equestrian Canada (EC) rules, due to the number of hunter-jumpers at the show, Swain said, and the actual requirement is that vaccination must be done 21 days out from the event. Information packages for both the fair’s hunter-jumper class and pole bending class (which is not sanctioned by EC), says vaccines must be current within six months and given no earlier than three weeks out from the show.

The exhibition was notified March 29, a day before competition, that some of the incoming participants didn’t meet the vaccine requirements, Swain said. He added that he got notice from the cowboy’s association that the event was cancelled late that day.

“While we were trying to figure out, is it seven days that we need it, or is it 21 … CCA made a decision just to cancel [the barrel racing],” Swain said. “They informed us that they had cancelled it, emailed all the competitors, then it was cancelled. They posted it cancelled while we were still working in the background to figure it out.”

The Canadian Cowboys Association did not respond to requests for comment as of press time. The organization’s 2025 bylaws and rodeo rules do not mention vaccine reporting rules.

Conflicting interpretations

When reached for clarification on the rules, a spokesperson for Equestrian Canada said “Equestrian Canada can confirm that the EC competition portion of the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair is fully compliant with the EC vaccination rules and is running with no cancellations. If there are other activities at the fair that require vaccinations, that is outside of our jurisdiction and we can not make comment.”

Guidance published by Equestrian Canada states that, as of 2020, “horses competing in competitions should receive a booster for Equine Influenza and Equine Herpes Virus within six (6) months +21 days before arrival at an event.”

In addition, the national organization says, no vaccine should have been administered within a week of arrival.

The provincial exhibition typically requires proof of vaccination by a certain date a few weeks out from the event so that they can review the paperwork, Swain said. Many entrants missed that date.

After news broke of the cancellation, Swain said they toyed with the idea of running an unsanctioned event for those who had already arrived and who did pass the bar on vaccines, “but we just thought it wasn’t fair to the people that had put the work into coming here for us to run anybody at that point.”

Competitors left scrambling

Would-be competitors took to social media to express their disappointment. Criticisms included the last-minute nature of the cancellation, given already booked accommodations, travel and time off work.

“Like many competitors, I spent months preparing my horse for this,” one account, attributed to the name Sandra Spencer, posted publicly on Facebook. “Time, money, and commitment all went into getting ready for this event —only to have it cancelled due to conflicting interpretations of a vaccination policy.”

Grady Stephenson says his daughter was set to compete in both barrel racing and pole bending. They stayed at the RMWF to compete in the latter after barrel races were called off.

Clear details have been hard to come by, he noted.

“With checking with CCA and checking with the provincial exhibition, everybody was kind of pointing the fingers at each other,” he said.

Coming from the Dauphin area, travel was less inconvenient for them than more far flung competitors, he noted, but “I think some that were coming from out of province were a little bit upset that things changes and when they changed.”

Fixing for next year

The provincial exhibition is talking about how to avoid similar pitfalls next year, Swain said.

The exhibition will be reviewing their vaccine requirements into a standardized policy, plans to send information out earlier and will likely move up the deadline to submit proof of vaccine.

“We understand how important this event is to our exhibitors, participants, and fans, and we sincerely apologize for the disappointment this has caused,” the exhibition’s April 1 release read. “Please know that our team explored every possible option to move forward with the event and worked closely with partners and exhibitors to try and find a solution.”

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They also saw newborn chicks flopping and flipping a few minutes after cracking their eggs.

Horses clopped down the alleys, hefty-muscled and throwing off anxious-for-the-ring energy.

There was straw, boots, company-branded gear, ropes, helmets, and that unique smell of animals, mini-doughnuts, manure and leather that comes with farm-focused fairs. It’s particularly potent when trapped inside the walls of the Keystone Centre.

All in all, the agricultural world was on fine display.

This event doesn’t have the hardcore commercial feel of Manitoba Ag Days, which happens in the exact same space and features gigantic machines, aggressive sales folk, the strutting of important industry people and an olfactory profile along the lines of rubber, new paint and fresh grease.

The Royal Manitoba Winter Fair isn’t for industry insiders and business. It’s for families and fun.

It is also a more holistic representation of the world that exists outside Winnipeg’s perimeter highway and beyond the sprawling of Western Canada’s other urban centres.

How many Canadians still experience this world? We know that very few people still live and work within agriculture. Small town Canada is shrinking, except for the trickle of ex-urban people who turn villages into suburbs.

It’s a unique world. So many things are ever so slightly different from city realities. The jeans worn by country and city people are famously divergent, but many elements of how people interact, chat, queue-up and react to inadvertent physical collisions are just a little bit different, from a city person’s perspective.

I enjoy noticing this when I go to a farm show, because I’m a city person, but I spend much of my life in the country, on farms, talking with farmers and getting worked-up by agricultural issues.

This year, I took my 14 year old with me to Brandon. Every year, I try to get my three kids to come with me to see the fair, to breathe in those smells, see those animals, walk along manure-enhanced hallways. It’s my belief that this will in some way expand their blinkered urban minds.

I wish more of my neighbours and friends had their kids here. It was such a great event. But how many people outside agriculture actually get to see it?

The post Opinion: Agri-culture embraced at Royal Manitoba Winter Fair appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba, which holds the major agro-tourism event in Brandon each year, says straw animal bedding will no longer be used at its events due to the cost of dealing with the used material.

Why it matters: The Royal Manitoba Winter Fair is one of three annual fairs put on by the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba and draws crowds to its horse shows, livestock spotlights and ag sector outreach.

The cost of waste transportation and waste tipping has risen, the organization said in a Jan. 9 social media post. Future events will have wood shaving and wood chip alternatives on hand, “subject to availability.”

General manager Mark Humphries said exhibitors will be able to purchase bedding materials from the event’s stockpile or source their own shavings or wood chips.

“Straw just turns out to be more bulky … When we actually start to move it out, it gets down to the sheer economics of it,” he said. “We can get more shavings into a tipping load than we can straw.”

Costs are driven by volume rather than weight, he added.

Manure is one of the biggest expenses for the exhibition’s agricultural fairs. At Ag Ex 2023, the victim of an early snowstorm in late October, show co-chair Dallas Johnston expected 120 tandem loads of manure to be hauled out of Brandon’s Keystone Centre.

That fair is the most cattle heavy of the exhibition’s three major events, with 2023 sporting five national or major regional breed shows and about 620 cattle.

The show typically maintains a 60-bale straw stockpile. Another 40 were added at the last minute in 2023 due to snow. The show estimated that it would spend $10,000 on manure hauling and $6,800 on wood chips for the event.

Other financial pressures are also rising. The Keystone Centre has raised the price of hosting events to make its own ends meet, Humphries noted.

The decision to limit bedding materials was not made lightly, “but we’re trying to cut down the expense to the exhibitor.

“If we have to start charging extra per class or per show because of the increased cost of bedding and transportation, I’m sure the exhibitors won’t be too comfortable. This way, we can still keep the entrance fee sensible,” said Humphries, though he acknowledged the policy will mean expense for exhibitors who previously sourced their own straw bedding.

The price to buy wood chips and shavings at the event is not yet known. The exhibition will watch the market and base the charge on what it pays.

“We don’t charge out the shavings to make a profit,” Humphries said. “We sell it actually at a straightforward one-for-one price.”

The exhibition is also trying to avoid raising visitor ticket prices. This will be the third year the organization has held ticket prices level.

“We understand the current climate that everybody’s in,” Humphries said. “The grocery basket price has gone up. The gas price is still very high. Cost of living in general is certainly a lot different than we were before COVID, so we are very conscious of that.”

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On March 30, the province announced almost $11 million in funding for Brandon’s Keystone Centre over the next several years. 

The facility hosts Ag Days, three Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba fairs, Manitoba Potato Production Days and other major ag events.

Why it matters: Manitoba’s ag sector taps the Wheat City’s Keystone Centre for a long list of fairs, trade shows and public outreach. 

The centre will receive $7.9 million to realize its sustainability plan, Premier Heather Stefanson said during a visit to the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair. That money is part of a larger five-year funding agreement between the City of Brandon and the province, worth $15.9 million.

“Our government is keen to collaborate with all levels of government, business leaders and our economic development partners to advance key initiatives that will support stronger, more vibrant communities and the continued growth of our economy,” Stefanson said.

Another $3 million will come from the province’s Arts, Culture and Sport in Community Fund and will go toward facility renovations.

That money will allow the centre to upgrade its main arena. The three-phase improvement plan includes better washroom accessibility, seating, air conditioning upgrades and less visible improvements like better loading ramps and sprinklers.

The funds will cover about half the overall renovation cost, according to the centre.

The chair of the Keystone Centre’s board, Bruce Luebke, said the influx gives the team, “the ability to build a robust capital plan for the next five years and to have some certainty when we strategically plan for the Keystone Centre’s future.”

“This agreement reinforces the importance of the Keystone Centre as an event venue and an economic driver in our community. It also represents a significant contribution from both the City of Brandon and the Manitoba government to recognize the capital needs that the Keystone Centre currently has and will continue to have into the future,” he said.

Normally home ice for the Brandon Wheat Kings hockey team, the main arena is also a key area for agriculture. Soil replaces the ice several times a year for the sake of horse showing, rodeo and other large-scale events including the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair. 

The week-long fair draws thousands of urban and rural visitors to the Keystone Centre and is the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba’s “pinnacle” event, according to the organization’s website.

In January, large farm equipment takes over the space, as part of Manitoba Ag Days, Canada’s largest indoor farm show.

“The Keystone Centre is the heart of the Westman community and major economic driver for the region,” Stefanson said. “This significant investment will help to ensure the Keystone Centre remains sustainable in the long term so it can continue to attract world-class events and provide ongoing cultural, recreational and economic opportunities for Brandon and the surrounding region.”

The 2023 Royal Manitoba Winter Fair ran from March 27 to April 1 and is one of three major fairs, along with the Manitoba Summer Fair and Ag Ex, put on annually by the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba.

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Nominations are open for the 2023 BMO Manitoba Farm Family Awards.

It will be the fifth round for the annual awards. Each year, the financial institution and organizing body for Brandon’s major agricultural fairs jointly honour a half dozen farms for “their commitment to agriculture and the community.”

Successful nominees are actively involved in agriculture and community, derive a major source of their income from agriculture and must have at least some members living on a farm and actively farming.

The award ceremony will take place during the winter fair. Winners will get free fair admission and behind the scenes privileges, the exhibition has said, along with an award plaque, one-night hotel stay and VIP seating at the fair’s evening show area.

The awards are an extension of a decades-old BMO program that similarly singles out farm families in southern Alberta. The program later spread to southwestern Ontario before making its Manitoba debut.

“BMO has deep ties to Canada’s agricultural industry,” states the award’s nomination portal. “Agriculture represents one of the largest portfolios of the bank and BMO has remained committed to providing the best agriculture products in the market to its customers, while providing a wealth of knowledge and experience to help grow and sustain the industry.”

Nominations are open until the end of January. Applications, including self-nominations, can be submitted through the exhibition’s website, under the tab for the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair.

The fair will run from March 27 to April 1 in Brandon’s Keystone Centre. It is the first of three major annual fairs organized by the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba, alongside the Manitoba Summer Fair and Ag Ex.

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By the time the calf hit the ground in the arena of the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair, the spectacle had drawn quite a crowd.

The birth was everything the beef producer would want to avoid — it was a hard pull, the calf contorted into the wrong position. The veterinarian on hand had a hard time repositioning the head or finding the front hoofs. The chains, once the hoofs were found, kept slipping.

Despite the difficulty, Dr. Everett More was calm as he explained each step in the process to the audience, even calling several children watching to assist.

There was no actual risk after all. The calf, and the cow, were fake.

Why it matters: A calving simulator can give future cattle producers experience on what to do when things go wrong, before they face it in the farmyard.

The demonstration was a chance for the Manitoba 4-H Council to show off “Clover,” a life-size calving simulator. Clover’s plastic and rubber body, modelled and painted after a Hereford cow, includes a mock uterus, birthing canal and realistically sized calf model.

The provincial 4-H council officially unveiled Clover during Brandon’s Royal Manitoba Winter Fair at the end of March. The simulator was the highlight of the council’s booth, with regular demonstrations throughout the week-long event.

For many in the audience, it was the first exposure to calving, Manitoba 4-H Council executive director Shannon Carvey said.

“The safe thing about the model is that they can just sort of get in there and help and I think it’s probably just been a great little experience for them… it’s so lifelike,” she said.

The latest tool in the council’s beef programming and ag education tool box, Clover began as a teaching resource for the Western College of Veterinary Medicine. The Manitoba 4-H Council acquired Clover. The model was purchased with help from the Manitoba Beef Producers, Manitoba Ag Days, MBFI, Crop Connect, Co-ops and $5,000 worth of provincial funding.

“This actually is exactly what they use at the veterinary college to teach students how to calve cows,” said More, a retired veterinarian — and the day’s calving demonstrator at the 4-H booth.

Aside from a realistic mimic to calving, without any of the real-world risks in play with live animals, the simulator’s value lies in the ability to set up different scenarios, he noted. Clover could easily simulate birth complications, hard pulls and other essential skills for those veterinary students without the stakes of animal health, and on demand.

It’s a benefit that the Manitoba 4-H Council hopes its own members will now derive.

Carvey said the purchase was actually made prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the council was unable to utilize it until now, due to public health measures. The simulator has spent the time at the Manitoba Beef and Forage Initiatives (MBFI), an applied research and ag education site north of Brandon near Brookdale.

On display

Clover will remain at MBFI indefinitely, Carvey said, but unlike those first months, this time Clover will not be idle.

While the simulator will not be hitting the road to visit any 4-H clubs, Carvey noted that veterinarians will be called in to hold workshops at the Brookdale site, using the simulator.

“There’s going to be a couple of different ways we’re going to use her,” she said. “We’re going to be able to use her for our beef kids in the 4-H program to teach about calving and how to get a leg that’s back and how to put the chains on properly, basically be able to pull a calf on their own if they needed to.”

MBFI staff have also expressed interest in using Clover for outreach to the urban population, such as with school groups or other events.

“She would be able to provide an opportunity for those kids to see how a baby calf is born and the life cycle of a cow,” Carvey said. “So she’s going to be a huge educational tool for us.”

The simulator will be a standing feature at MBFI’s Learning Centre, Carvey said. The centre was constructed in 2018 to expand the farm’s capacity for farmer-oriented extension, ag education and public outreach.

The post VIDEO: ‘Clover’ provides real calving skills, without a real cow appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Of the above-average 16 carcasses entered, a quarter had broken the 80-point mark, out of a total of 111 points possible.

Colour was, in general, good, ranging consistently more to the midpoint of the six-point index used to gauge the colour grade of a loin. Entrant carcasses were also bigger than he remembers years ago, the veteran grader said, and more of that mass was actually meat.

Twelve years ago, he mused, the average finishing weight of a competition might be 98 kilograms. Looking at competition entries, he figures that number’s now close to 103 to 104 kilograms.

“Now the producers are getting the different genetics… a huge part of it is the feed that they choose and they just know when to add the right amount (of something) to balance them out so that they’re not gaining a lot of fat,” he said.

It was a grand return for the pork quality competition, a mainstay of the annual Royal Manitoba Winter Fair, held in Brandon each year. The fair is one of three agricultural fairs put on annually by the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba.

RMWF 2022 also marked only the second large-scale in-person event organized by the exhibition since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Ag Ex, the exhibition’s typical autumn fair, ran with a reduced schedule last fall.

Winners

If the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair was back, so was Barrickman Colony, located just northwest of St. François Xavier.

The winners of this year’s pork quality competition are no strangers to the podium in pork quality competition, having found success at the 2019 Prairie Livestock Expo and 2020 Brandon Hog and Livestock Show.

“It feels awesome,” Mike Hofer said of the newest win. “We’ve done it a few times already and honestly didn’t expect it, but here we are.”

The winning offering gained a total 88 points out of a possible 111, with a 97.5-kilogram carcass.

Barrickman Colony took first place by only two points, edging out Sprucewood Colony near Brookdale, which earned 86 points for its 105.2-kilogram carcass.

Third-place Cypress Colony, from Cypress River, narrowly missed a place as reserve champion, coming in one point behind with 85 points.

“This pork quality competition highlights the ability of producers like you to finish these pigs to the highest standard that we have,” Care told producers during the competition’s awards ceremony. “It shows people how you can basically finish these pigs and meet these tight parameters and measurements that we have.”

Community

Each carcass is now on its way back into the community, according to fair co-chair Wayne Buhr. Entries will be used for training purposes in Assiniboine Community College’s culinary arts program, and are eventually bound for local food banks.

In another return of tradition, prize money will also be split between the winner and a charity of their choice.

Cypress Colony opted to split prize money with Winnipeg’s Ronald McDonald House, while Sprucewood Colony will be sending funds to its local hospital, Carberry Plains Health Centre.

Barrickman Colony, however, opted for a charity outside of the medical sphere. Prize money from this year’s pork quality competition win will go to HEART, the Hutterian Emergency Aquatic Response Team — a charitable search-and-recovery dive team based out of Morris.

The rescue dive team was “something different,” Hofer said.

“We always do Children’s Hospital in Winnipeg and just decided to do something different this year,” he said.

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They looked forward to the day this spring, when entertainers, horse and cattle shows, ag education, petting zoos and trade shows that typically draw thousands to Brandon at the end of March, resumed.

COVID-19, however, has had other plans.

Why it matters: The Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba, like many organizations like it, is trying to take away some of COVID-19’s financial sting by moving events online.

The Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba, the organizing body for three of Manitoba’s largest annual ag fairs, is now 0-4 on its last in-person events, although some form of the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair was hosted online.

The organization turned to virtual event planning and social media to mark its 50th anniversary, carried over from last year.

“This year, we had a little bit more time to put together something virtual so we can celebrate as much as we can,” exhibition president Greg Crisanti said.

The last week of March 2021 saw the exhibition launch a series of virtual trivia quizzes, draws, behind-the-scenes features, daily themes and sold-out drive-through meals in lieu of an in-person fair. “Behind the Barns,” a series of interviews spotlighting the fair’s best-known draws and unsung heroes, such as the exhibition’s longtime announcer or its draft horse and hackney pony shows, were pushed online daily.

Dollars and cents

Last March, the exhibition’s plans for a grand anniversary got sidelined only 10 days before gates were meant to open. That disappointment was followed by the cancellation of both the Manitoba Summer Fair and Ag Ex later in the year, putting significant financial strain on the organization.

After losing their three main income drivers for 2020, the exhibition launched its ‘Love A Fair’ fundraising campaign in January of this year. The campaign, which hosted both a series of smaller fundraising events and a call for local financial support, also includes $100,000 in matched dollar-for-dollar donations from the Winnipeg Kinsmen.

On March 31, the exhibition announced a $5,000 donation from Western Manitoba-based Westoba Credit Union as part of that campaign.

“Another year without the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair is disappointing,” the credit union’s president, Jim Rediger, said. “Even more disappointing would be the Provincial Exhibition not being here when it’s safe to host fairs again. We recognize the impact COVID-19 has had on our city and the entire event industry. Westoba is committed to supporting our community resources when they need it the most.”

The last year has been one for “thinking outside the box and working as hard as we can,” Crisanti said.

The ‘Love A Fair’ campaign has hosted online auctions, 50/50 draws, fundraising sales and outdoor markets thus far.

“All of those side fundraising events that normally would not happen because we’d be focusing on one of our live events,” Crisanti said. “(It’s) kept us alive until this point, along with the support and donations from our community and surrounding communities of people hearing our story and helping us out financially when we need it the most.”

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The exhibition board has suspended planning for the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair, which typically draws thousands to Brandon’s Keystone Centre for trade shows, horse and cattle exhibits, agricultural education and other entertainment in March, the exhibition announced Nov. 24.

“We are deeply saddened to make this announcement,” the exhibition board said in a release. “However, the health and safety of our community is of utmost importance. The provincial exhibition directors and staff remain dedicated to bring live events back to Brandon, as well as seek other ways to celebrate agriculture and community in a safe and enjoyable way. There will be future events, but until then, we will be looking for your support and generosity.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has already claimed all three 2020 fairs normally put on by the exhibition. The 2020 Royal Manitoba Winter Fair, Manitoba Summer Fair and Ag Ex were all cancelled in light of health concerns and provincial health orders.

The loss of all three major events this year has put a financial strain on the organization, exhibition president Greg Crisanti said earlier this year. In August, the organization said they expected the economic hit to Brandon from the cancellations to total about $18 million.

The organization has spent the last months attempting to close in on the financial gap  though smaller events, as well as a #SavetheFairs campaign in the hope of drumming up financial support.

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