The coordinator of the 2012 Hog and Poultry Days Pork Quality Competition reports this year’s competition was extremely tight.
The Hog and Poultry Day’s 2012 Pork Quality competition, held Wednesday in Winnipeg, attracted 50 entries.
This year’s top three winners included the New Haven Colony North from Argyle in first, Deerboine Colony from Alexander in second and Aspenheim Colony from Bagot in third.
Pork Quality Competition Coordinator Jason Care says judges are looking for the perfect market hog.
Basically the guidelines, number one we’re looking at the yield which is basically the amount of muscle mass that is in the hog.
Number two we look at topics such as color of the pork, we look at the marbling, the measurement of an actual loin, the square surface area of it.
Then on top of that they have to be within a certain weight restriction.
What we’ve done over the past couple of shows is we’ve narrowed down the criteria.
We’ve sat down with the entrants.
For example this year in June we sat down with 25 different entrants and went through what type of guidelines we want to follow and what the criteria is, so they get to choose and have a say in what we’re going to represent.
What we’ve narrowed it down to is basically the closest to the perfect market hog that you can buy in the store.
It’s very similar to what they’re marketing.
The only difference is they’re narrowing down different things, whether it’s the back fat, whether they’re getting it a little bit smaller or the larger loin so all these things tied together it makes it hard to judge and try to get a hog in there.
If we look at this year’s competition, especially in the top ten, we had three ties.
Two of them were two way ties and one three way tie out of just the top ten hogs alone so looking at that it’s impressive to see that our numbers actually fell that close together.
Care notes the increase in entries bumped up the volume of pork donated to Winnipeg Harvest to just over nine thousand pounds just before Christmas.
