The 75 million dollar Hog Farm Transition Program allows Canadian pork producers to submit tenders for closing their production facilities for a minimum of three years.

The first ten million dollars under the program will be awarded on 28 October.

Canadian Pork Council President Jurgen Preugschas says bids have come in from right across Canada for the first round.

Jurgen Preugschas-Canadian Pork Council

Every producer is required, first of all, to register.

At present we've got quite a number of applications in already and they all have to be verified of course.

Welsh and Company is the company that we hired out of Ottawa, an auditing firm that is doing the actual work on it, and they go through the application of registration, make sure everything's OK and then they actually send out a bid form to those producers that are eligible and the producers then will be required to send their bid form back to Welsh and Company's office by 2:00 p.m. eastern Standard time on Wednesday.

The bulk of the registrations so far that have come in are from Ontario but we have had registrations from every province in Canada.

There's been a lot of calls from across the country and those producers that are interested are in the process of being registered.

Mr Preugschas notes the CPC will make public as much information on the value of winning bids as possible in order to assist producers bidding in subsequent rounds.

He says the intent is to hold subsequent rounds and disperse the 75 million dollar fund as quickly as possible.