The Manitoba Pork Marketing Cooperative is confident a new joint venture hog marketing service will ultimately lead to reduced marketing costs for producers in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Last April Manitoba Pork Marketing and the SPI Marketing Group announced the formation of a joint hog marketing venture to serve pork producers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan beginning in 2010.
Manitoba Pork CEO Perry Mohr says Hog Administrative Services, or h@ms, will provide a full slate of marketing services to a larger customer base.
In the first year in particular I’m not convinced there’s going to be a tremendous amount of savings.
What it does do is it spreads the cost per unit over a larger volume of hogs.
I’d be naive to say that our costs are not going to change.
Certainly there’s going to be an increase in costs simply due to the fact that we’re going to be more visible in Saskatchewan and the costs related with being more visible.
Having said that, again, as long as the cost doesn’t outweigh the benefit which is what our goal is, yes there’s going to be a slight increase in cost, the overall cost, but if you’re spreading that over a larger number of hogs the cost per unit goes down.
We’re keeping our eye on that ball and hoping that once we get things up and running that we will be able to add efficiencies to scale to this equation and, I guess, our goal is always to offer the best service package at the lowest possible cost.
Both provinces are going to be charging a 50 cent marketing fee and it’s our goal to see if we can chisel that down to maybe 40 cents at some point in the future.
Mohr says by combing volumes of hogs and resources it will be possible to offer a high level of service to producers in both provinces at a very reasonable cost.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
