Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for inviting me here today.
I'm going to speak in French, because I'll be able to tell you more in less time. I speak some English, but not perfectly.
Asta Foods is a family business with 500 employees. We do slaughter and primary processing of pork. We do not do secondary processing. We sell our products to distributors, large grocery chains and further processors, but between 60% and 65% of our production is exported to 35 countries. So a lot of our production is sent to many countries around the world.
We have also invested in pork production. In fact, 50% of the pigs that come to Asta Foods come from farms that we are associated with. We have also invested in a feed mill, a refrigerated meat transport company and several maternity facilities. These investments have ensured the sustainability of Asta Foods.
As I said earlier, Asta Foods is a family business. My father built it after buying out the facilities of a company that went bankrupt in 1982. When we started, we were processing about 300 animals a day. Now we process 4,100 hogs a day. So it's really a nice business. My father is a visionary and he is passing the torch to us. My brother and I have taken over and the transfer is complete.
So it's a business that could really thrive, but unfortunately the lack of workers is very stressful for me. The future is very stressful to me. It's not because the business is not financially healthy or because it hasn't made good investments; it's because of the lack of workers. Right now, I have to throw meat in the garbage because I'm short of workers. I have to throw away a lot of offal and fat, and sometimes even heads, because I don't have enough workers. I'm losing about $3 million a month. That's not per year, that's per month: that's $3 million per month I'm throwing away. We are facing a challenge.
At Asta Foods, we take care of our employees. We are a family business. I know the names of all my employees, even though I have 500, because I've been working with them since I was a little girl. We have a lot of Canadian employees, and I want to continue to have them. As Ms. MacKinnon, whom I know well, said, it's very expensive to get immigrants to work here. So it's not the first option at Asta Foods, but they are the ones who have saved us so far.
I admit to being very stressed about what is in store for us in the next few years, and even this summer. It's so bad, I don't even know if I'll be able to maintain production every day this summer. I may have to slow down my production line. Meanwhile, there are pigs piling up in the barns. It's a very stressful situation for producers as well.
In the Lower St. Lawrence, there are several large companies in the same sector. We are far from the major centres, where most of the immigrants are. We can't bus people from Montreal or Quebec City to work here. It's not attractive for them to move away from their families and drive four and a half hours, or nine hours to get here and back.