Excellent. Sounds good.
Thanks again.
We've provided some submissions for you. There are some PowerPoint slides, but I'm not going to follow the PowerPoint. There's a letter there from a former mayor, from the community where we're operating, and some other documents, so please do take the time. They're good documents. They support what I'm going to be sharing and what Baerbel and the other folks here are going to be sharing.
I want to talk a little about our organization. I'll start by saying that I was at my son's baseball game the other day. He's a young guy. The president of our organization was there, so we sat beside each other. He said he was at a meeting. We're in Manitoba. We're based out of rural Manitoba, and he was at a meeting in Calgary. He was also presenting before a government group. They followed up with him after that meeting and asked what our number one thing right now is at HyLife. He said the number one thing is that we can continue to access workers from overseas—that we have a lot of number one things, but that's the number one of the number ones. That is just to say that this is our number one issue, as an organization, in terms of government programs that help us operate. Let me get to that.
We started in 1994. A bunch of farmers in southeast Manitoba got together and said, “Let's build a hog barn.” They built that hog barn and employed about 10 people. Fast-forward to today, and we're at about 1,850 people throughout Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota.
We didn't rely significantly on the temporary foreign worker program until about 2008. It was 2008 when we moved from being farmers to being people who make food. We raised the pigs, but we sold our hogs to companies like Maple Leaf and other food processors, and they processed our pigs for us. Then we decided we wanted to be fully integrated. Our vision statement is to be the best Canadian food company in the world. To be the best Canadian food company, you have to be a food company, so we needed to buy a food processing plant, or build one.
We bought one. There was a food processing plant in Neepawa, Manitoba. We bought the plant. At the time that plant had 300 employees. We needed that plant to process all of the hogs that we produce. We produce about 1.7 million hogs a year.
With the footprint of the plant and the numbers of people at the plant, they could not process all of those hogs. We needed to essentially add about 800 folks to that plant. The town of Neepawa was 3,000 people at the time. We did scour all of Neepawa for skilled meat cutters and folks to work in our plant. The primary processing position that we needed to fill at the plant was the meat cutter. We scoured the east coast of Canada. We hired some lobster farmers. We hired mushroom farmers from Ontario. We hired construction workers from Alberta. We hired all kinds of folks from all kinds of places. Did we find 800 people? No, we did not. We needed to go overseas to find folks, and we looked for skilled people with a minimum of two years of experience, and preferably three or more.
At the time, this was pre-middle of 2014, so it was before all the changes that happened to the temporary foreign worker program. It was called the LMO process, which I'm sure you're familiar with. We had to go through that. We were fine to go through that.
I'll pass it on to Baerbel, but I'm going to quickly finish my story here. If we would go back in time, if I took you in a DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future and we went back to 2008, with the changes that have happened now, limiting us with the cap calculation, with the one-year duration, we would not exist as an organization today. That's not being melodramatic. There are other hog producers in the prairies that have closed their doors, and we were able to continue to operate because of great people and being able to access those folks locally and overseas.