Farmscape for December 10, 2014

The top 10 winners of the 2014 Prairie Livestock Expo Pork Quality Competition and their charities of choice will share approximately $27,000 in prize money.
The winners of 2014 Pork Quality Competition, held in conjunction with Prairie Livestock Expo in Winnipeg, will be named this afternoon.
Dennis Stevenson, a territory sales manager with Zoetis and a member of the Prairie Livestock Expo organizing committee, notes entries are judged according to criteria used for grading at Manitoba's pork processing plants and the top 10 are on display at the event.

Clip-Dennis Stevenson-Zoetis:
We have just under 40 entries this year ranging from all of Manitoba I guess.
The majority of the entrants would be from the colony farms.
One of the great things about this competition is it's sponsored by many people across the province of Manitoba and some of these companies are national like Zoetis where the sponsorship is brought in.
This year we've got just over $27,000 in sponsorships.
All of the entrants fill out a form and they choose a charity to donate their winnings to.
Not all of the winnings go to charity but a large portion.
It's the choice of entrants.
For sure 50% of all the prize money goes to the charities and I believe in previous years now almost 90 plus percent of all the winnings have gone to charity.
Along with all the meat is donated to Winnipeg harvest or Siloam Mission or any of those types of things to feed the needy at Christmas.

Since the Pork Quality Competition was introduced in 1996 more than $345,000 have been donated to international, national, rural and urban charities and more than 47,000 kilograms of pork have been donated to Manitoba food banks.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council