A producer-owned company plans to retrofit a 60,000 sq. foot Winnipeg hog plant so it can slaughter and process 250 head of cattle per day by 2010.
Formerly owned by Maple Leaf Foods, the decades-old plant was closed in October when the company added a second shift to its Brandon plant.
Natural Prairie Beef president Kelly Penner said the plant will increase the number of Manitoba-grown cattle that are processed at home to 60,000 head a year from the 20,000 head now handled by a handful of small provincially inspected abattoirs.
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“It would definitely help. We’re at a huge freight disadvantage shipping out west. If you watch the markets, we’re pretty much week in week out at a six, seven, eight cent disadvantage on what they pay for our cattle,” he said.
“You can go either east to Cargill or south, but anywhere you want to go, it’s about 12 hours or more.”
Penner said 15 to 20 workers would start processing custom slaughtered carcasses this fall into hormone-free, kosher, halal and conventionally raised products that could appear on store shelves by the end of the year.
Cattle will come mainly from Manitoba and neighbouring provinces. A scheduled $25 million upgrade for the facility by 2010 would raise the number of staff to 80, and Penner said a cooler expansion could increase capacity to 500 head per day.
Formed in 2004, Natural Prairie Beef is owned by 50 Manitoba ranchers who collectively own 12,000 head of cattle.
The acquisition of a slaughter plant comes at a good time for the producers because the initial interpretation of the United States’ country-of-origin-labelling (COOL) rules cuts them off from their main market, shipments of live calves to Coleman Natural Foods in Colorado.
“The intent was to raise cattle and send them to Coleman Natural, and then once we opened our doors, we’d start feeding them through our program,” he said.
“Then we got cut off because of the COOL regulations. I don’t know if the latest reading will open it back up to us or not.”
The group hopes to market their cattle under the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association’s branded beef program, which operates an on-farm food safety program based on the hazard analysis critical control points system.
All animals produced under the program have a unique number and electronic tag to ensure traceability, and all animals born after 2006 are age verified.
Slaughter animals are not fed animal byproducts, and minimal antibiotics are used. During the 120-day finishing program, any animals that must be treated with antibiotics are removed from the program.
Penner said most of the cattle killed at the Winnipeg plant will be conventionally raised, but the natural cattle produced by the group for niche markets would expand in the future based on sales.
“The larger part in the start-up phase is going to over-30-month cows and conventional cattle going into the kosher and halal market,” he said.
A Chinese partner who owns a large seafood company has pledged to invest in the plant beginning in 2009 and assist in marketing Canadian beef to large retailers and supermarkets in China, where it will be sold as a premium meat product competing with Australian beef.
The company received $1.2 million to purchase the plant from the Manitoba Cattle Enhancement Council, which collects $2 per head on every animal sold in the province for the purpose of building additional slaughter capacity in the province.
The latest funding brings the council’s investment in Natural Prairie Beef to $2.4 million since October 2007.
