The situation in Manitoba is essentially that one large processing company is, shall we say, consolidating its operations.They're expanding their new plant in Brandon, and the intent is to get to a double shift so they can process 4.5 million, 5 million pigs a year. They're closing operations in places like Saskatchewan, and Saskatchewan will be in the situation where they'll have no federally inspected plants. Those pigs will have to leave that province and go elsewhere.
Currently we ship 1.3 million pigs into the United States to a processing plant there, because of competitive price reasons. We have producers who don't want, necessarily, to accept the Maple Leaf price; they want to get another price. So we're in the process of trying to attract another processor to set up a plant in Winnipeg, and that company is still working away at this thing. We're going through an environmental hearing process, and there's a new business plan being put together to get that plant up and running. It will probably process two million pigs or something like that.
Our other issue is that we have shipped four million wealings into the United States to go to feeding operations in Iowa and Minnesota. In Iowa last year they built 290 finishing barns, and we've built 10 here in Manitoba. So we want to get into more finishing at some point or other in the province, depending on price, but more importantly, depending on availability of grains at a reasonable price so that we can make sure the grain farmer makes some money at this thing and our hog producers can make money.
The big thing is transportation costs, and that's what we're trying to work away at. These COOL regulations that are coming pose another threat to us as well, so we want to have more of a made-in-Canada, made-in-Manitoba solution to our issues here.