Bagot Area Hutterite Colony Claims Top Award at Prairie Livestock Expo Pork Quality Competition

Dec 11, 2014

By Bruce Cochrane

A Bagot, Manitoba area Hutterite Colony has claimed the top award at the 2014 Pork Quality Competition held in conjunction with Prairie Livestock Expo in Winnipeg.
The 2014 Pork Quality Competition, held in conjunction with Prairie Livestock Expo in Winnipeg, attracted 36 entries from farms from across the province.

The event which is held every two years in support of local, national and international charities chosen by the winners and local food banks, brings together pork producers to showcase their products.

This year's grand champion carcass was entered by Aspenheim Colony Farms at Bagot, Wellwood Colony Farms of Ninette entered the reserve champion carcass and Glenway Colony Farms of Dominion City claimed third.

Jason Care, the manager-auditor of Manitoba Hog Grading and one of the event judges, says criteria for the competition is designed to reflect what the processors are looking for.

Jason Care-Manitoba Hog Grading:
A lot of the entrants that do enter into the competition ship to the processors, whether it's Maple Leaf or Hylife or the provincial ones in the province.

They set up this competition to sort of mock what they would call the best pork that would be marketable in Manitoba so the guidelines are set to follow it on that and it's a judging of the loin, it's a judging of the backfat, the belly, the color of it so it's all levels that they set the criteria at and that's what we move forward with.
The biggest one is usually the loin.

They base it out of a loin, marbling because it's not very common to have a lot of marbling in pork.

In this competition when you look at these loins you see this increased marbling and that comes down to the genetics that we have here in Manitoba which the processors are really looking forward to.

Care notes all of the pork, a total of nine thousand pounds, will be donated to local food banks and just over 21 thousand dollars in prize money will be shared by charities chosen by the winners.

For a complete list of this year's winners visit prairielivestockexpo.ca.

Source: Farmscape

Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

I am going to show you how we save our farm money by making our own pig feed. It's the same process as making our cattle feed just with a slight adjustment to our grinder/ mixer that makes all the difference. We buy all the feed stuff required to make the total mix feed. Run each through the mixer and at the end of the process we have a product that can be consumed by our pigs.

I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.