Last fall Manitoba's pork marketing cooperative announced, due to the closure of Maple Leaf Foods Marion Street pork processing plant in Winnipeg, it would be closing its Winnipeg assembly yard.

Manitoba Pork Marketing CEO Perry Mohr says, while there are still some die-hards that want to continue delivering their hogs to Winnipeg, the transition has virtually seemless.

Perry Mohr-Manitoba Pork Marketing

We've tried to transition some of the producers that were coming into Winnnipeg to New Bothwell which is a facility that we started operating in the fall of 07 and we're still working on another alternative for producers for once the Winnipeg facility closes.

Right now it looks like there's a vey good possibility that we'll be able to partner with somebody out on number six highway and we're going to put a small receiving facility up there as well.

The good news is that things are transitioning quite nicely.

There's a lot of people that are going directly to Brandon or Neepawa and we will be able to provide assembly facilities for those propducers that can't take loads that meet that 70 criteria at Brandon at both New Bothwell, possibly on number six highway and of course we've still got our assembly yards at Neepawa.

The good news for producers is that, as a result of this restructuring, we have elected as an organization to reflect to that in the cost of our service fee.

We are going to be dropping our service fee from 70 cents a hog down to 50 cents a hog.

I beleive the date is effective the week after July fouth.

Mohr concedes, unfortuantly, an alternate Winnipeg delivery option will not be in place in time for the June 27 closure of the Marion Street assembly yard.

However, he's hopefull another option in around Winnipeg will be up and running and functional by the time the snow starts flying this fall.