H@ms Marketing Services has announced it will be rebating 80 percent of the marketing fees paid by its member pork producers during 2011.
H@ms Marketing Services is a producer owned cooperative that provides pork producers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan a range of services including marketing into the cash market, risk management services for hogs and feed, price insurance and in-transit insurance.
General Manager Perry Mohr says producers who marketed through the co-op last year will get back 40 cents per hog marketed.
The total amount involved is 575 thousand dollars.
Now our marketing fee is set at 50 cents per hog so, as a result of the 40 being rebated, we’re actually rebating 80 percent of the marketing fee to the producers.
Factors that give us the ability to do this are numerous.
We provide services for hog producers but we also provide services for other particular entities in the industry.
We retail those services to these entities and we get paid a fee for it.
So, when we combine all of our different profit centres at the end of the year and add up our profits and then from that subtract the total cost to do business, we were left with a tidy little profit of 575 thousand dollars which we have historically rebated back to producers.
If you go back over the last ten years we have probably rebated in excess of three million dollars to the hog producers that have done business through the co-op.
Mohr notes, last year producers paid 10 cents per hog to market through the co-op.
He suggests you won’t find any other business, especially in the hog industry, that’s operating on such a low margin.
