LEROY, Sask. — Only the pigs were missing.
On Feb. 4 Ivan and Sharon Stomp and family threw open the doors of the newest hog unit in Saskatchewan and 500 people, including the provincial minister of agriculture, came to look.
Because of health restrictions, no hogs were in the buildings, so visitors were free to wander through bare offices, shower rooms, gestation and farrowing barns.
Ivan Stomp said they decided to have the open house so the community could see it before traffic was restricted by the facility’s disease-free status.
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“By being open, I want people to understand what I’m doing,” he says.
Stomp is conscious of being a good neighbor. Before the financing was in place or the ground broken on the building site, he sent a letter to neighbors asking how they felt about a hog unit of this size in the community.
When financing was approved, Stomp hired local companies to design the unit, supply the materials and build it.
Local doesn’t meant Saskatoon either. Most of the companies Stomp thanked during his official opening speech were from Humboldt, Leroy and Lanigan.
He said the farrow-to-finish unit will house 1,200 sows and market 45,000 head per year. That puts it among the biggest in Saskatchewan.
In four years, the 35-year-old farmer says he’ll be raising 10,000 head of sows in seven units and employing 100 people. He’s got enough construction work planned to keep 600 workers busy for five years, he says. The hogs will eat 75,000 tonnes of feedgrains a year.
Stomp became a hog producer in 1979 when he took over the operation of an 800-sow unit at Lanigan.
Glen Herndier, with the Royal Bank in Regina, says one of the reasons his bank financed the operation — to the tune of $5.5 million — is Stomp’s success in turning around the older Lanigan unit.
Profitable enterprise
The other, Herndier says, is the bank ranks hogs as the most profitable agricultural enterprise in the province right now.
“I can’t stress enough about the opportunity here in Saskatchewan,” Stomp said in an interview earlier in the day. “Someone just has to take the initiative. I’m very comfortable with what I’m doing.”
Stomp and his wife are the sole owners in the enterprise, which is considerably larger than most family-owned hog operations.
“This is the new family farm,” he says.
