Agriculture committee  At the plant in Borden we have a hook-owners' cooperative, in which every animal that goes into the plant, basically the farmers have bought in shares type of deal. The plant to this point has not been buying up to its capacity, so as of now supply has not been a problem, but tha

Agriculture committee  The Atlantic Beef Products plant in Borden, after two or three years of negotiations, finally obtained their ACOA money, so there is some new equipment and some value-added equipment going in there. They'll be getting into the grind of business here in the next month or so, so th

Agriculture committee  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'll do a quick introduction here. Our executive director, Rinnie Bradley, will read our presentation. I'd like to welcome you all to P.E.I.. Thank you for taking the time to come to visit us. We do realize that everyone has busy seasons. W

Agriculture committee  Yes. I think we have some younger farmers coming on board. We just need to get profitability back into the marketplace. We need to be a profitable business, and with profitable businesses, family farms will continue and the next generation will come on. But we need direction from

Agriculture committee  The producers who are still in business are very heavily indebted, to the point where they're being forced into foreclosure. They just can't continue. So that's where we're asking for and where we need some help, whether through Farm Credit Canada or whichever, to restructure the

Agriculture committee  Yes. We recognize that Mr. Ritz has kind of taken that on as a project, and we thank him for that because every market is a market. The carcass has to be divided into value-added as best we can. These markets are enabling plants—and hopefully a plant on P.E.I. as well—to tap into

Agriculture committee  Technically, in Prince Edward Island, because of what he said about beef moving across the country and from country to country, we only produce through our P.E.I. plant about 15% of the beef that's used on P.E.I. We have a captive market, if we could just get tapped into it throu

Agriculture committee  I'm sorry. We produce about 15% of the Maritimes' usage. As everybody has said, things get moved around so much that.... Our plant in P.E.I. could certainly expand tenfold, if we could get the local stores to take on all our products. To make another point about our plant in Bor

Agriculture committee  We have direct access to a plant in Prince Edward Island, Atlantic Beef Products Inc., a new facility that's only a couple of years old. For the hogs there were two plants, one in P.E.I. and one in Nova Scotia. The P.E.I. plant has closed, but there is still a plant in Nova Scoti

Agriculture committee  We have had several opportunities to meet with government officials. On October 21, 2008, the Maritime Beef Council met in Halifax with three maritime ministers. A meeting with the P.E.I. Cattle Producers and the Hon. Gail Shea resulted in a meeting with the Hon. Gerry Ritz in Ot