Farmscape for December 14, 2016

The Coordinator of the Prairie Livestock Expo Pork Quality Competition says Manitoba charities and local food banks will be the big winners of this year's event.
32 hog carcasses from across Manitoba have been entered in the Pork Quality Competition which will be held in conjunction with the 2016 edition of Prairie Livestock Expo today in Winnipeg.
Carcasses are judged according to the criteria used by Manitoba's pork processing plants, Maple Leaf in Brandon and HyLife in Neepawa, to grade pork quality including carcass weight, meat color and loin eye size.
Dennis Stevenson, the Pork Quality Competition Coordinator with the Prairie Livestock Expo Organizing Committee, says the top winners will share a pool of money, at least half of which will be donated to the charities of the winners' choice and all of the meat will go to local food banks.

Clip-Dennis Stevenson-Prairie Livestock Expo:
We have raised 25,500 dollars.
Out of that sponsorship money we take the cost of the event out and then the rest of the money is then put up for prize money.
What ever is left, e split it between the top 10 places and those people have a choice.
The winner can contribute all the money to charity or they can keep up to a maximum of 50 percent of the prize money for use on their own farms or things like that but, in previous years we've seen most of the folks donate 100 percent of their winnings to charity.
On top of that, this year we do have an additional prize that was put in where the winner of the competition is going to get a trip down to the Iowa Pork Expo.
Pork is given back to charities here in the city.
Places like Siloam Mission, Winnipeg Harvest are the folks that help us and they distribute that meat throughout the Christmas season.

Stevenson says this is really a regular part of what Manitoba's pork producers do but the Pork Quality Competition provides an opportunity to highlight that work through a friendly competition.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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