SASKATOON – Farmers around Beechy, Sask., are being asked to put their money into pigs.
Beechy Pig Investors Group is trying to raise between $450,000 and $900,000 to help build a 600-sow farrow-to-finish operation.
That would make Beechy PIG, as it’s almost certain to become known, one of the biggest piggeries in the province.
“It’s sort of the new level of size you have to be at to be able to compete in the future,” said Richard Wright of Quadra Management in Outlook, a major investor in the project. And he added the project has been designed so it can be expanded to hold 1,200 sows.
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Quadra and five farmers in the Beechy area have already put $300,000 into the project through a company called Beechy Stock Farm Ltd. In late July, the company received permission from the Saskatchewan Securities Commission to begin seeking capital from local investors.
For $5,000, investors will get a limited partnership unit in the proposed new venture.
For $20,000, they’ll earn the right to deliver grain to the facility at a rate of around 20 tonnes per unit. The facility expects to buy about 3,000 tonnes of feed grain annually.
Start this fall
The limited partnership units will be on sale until Sept. 30, although Wright said they hope to achieve the minimum $450,000 by the middle of August. That would enable them to start concrete work this fall, put in breeding stock before the end of the year, produce pigs next spring and start selling them by September 1995.
Beechy Stock Farm president Bob Odermatt said the new business will bring economic diversification, along with five full-time jobs, to the Beechy district, about 70 kilometres northeast of Swift Current.
“This project provides the opportunity to invest in a local enterprise which offers an attractive return on investment,” he said.
The project won’t make a lot of money in the early years as it spends to build inventories and develop business plans, said Wright, but the financial structure allows investors to take advantage of those expected losses.
“There’s a fairly nice tax rebate associated with the project in the early years,” he said.
The Beechy project is just the latest manifestation of the apparently irresistible trend towards larger and larger hog production units in the province, said Bill Henley of Saskatchewan Agriculture.
In 1984, nine percent of the total hog production in Saskatchewan came from operations turning out more than 4,000 pigs per year (roughly a 200-sow operation). In 1993, 41 percent of total production came from those large operations.
“And this isn’t just happening in Saskatchewan or a Western Canada trend,” said Henley. “It’s a worldwide trend of pork production concentrating down to larger and larger units.”
The biggest single operating unit in Saskatchewan has about 1,000 sows, but in the U.S. developers are talking about setting up farms with 10,000 or more.
Wright said the additional production from operations like Beechy PIG won’t hurt small producers. There’s no question Saskatchewan can stand to produce more pigs, as new markets are developed in the U.S. and Mexico. The world produces about 900 million pigs annually with Saskatchewan contributing about one million: “When you look at that on a graph, you can hardly even tell Saskatchewan’s producing pigs.”
