Springhill Farms and the town of Neepawa have finalized an agreement that will allow upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant that processes effluent from the company's Neepawa pork processing plant to proceed.

Denis Vielfaure, the executive vice president of projects and environmental affairs with Hytek, says the facility will exceed new provincial standards for wastewater treatment.

Denis Vielfaure-Hytek Limited

When Hytek purchased Springhill Farms back in February of '08 it was identified that the current wastewater treatment plant needed to be upgraded so we embarked on that project together with the town of Neepawa and what we developed is a state of the art wastewater treatment plant that will be able to process all of the effluent for the full licensed capacity of the processing plant.

It will be able to do that in a fashion that will meet the new current regulatory regime which is a 15 to one nitrogen phosphorus treatment for the Lake Winnipeg strategy and it will meet and exceed those regulations.

Currently we're at approximately, I'll use approximate numbers, but currently on an annual basis we are pretty much limited to about 900 thousand hogs that we can process here at Springhill Farms.

With the new wastewater treatment plant and with the expansions on Springhill Farms we will be able to move that number closer to 1.4 million hogs processed per year.

Mr Vielfaure notes the renovations are already underway and are expected to be completed in early April 2010.