Last month Manitoba Pork Marketing and its Saskatchewan counterpart the SPI Marketing Group announced the formation of h@ms or hog administrative marketing services, a new joint venture company that will provide marketing, procurement, settlement, in-transit insurance and risk management services on behalf of the two parent companies.

Manitoba Pork Marketing CEO Perry Mohr says producers will initially notice very little change in the way their services are provided but those services will be enhanced .

Perry Mohr-Manitoba Pork Marketing

The benefit for us in Manitoba is that, in the last year in particular, we lost a fair number of producers and a fair number of hogs.

Subsequently, providing a top high level marketing package was becoming more and more of a challenge or at least it was getting more costly if we were spreading the entire cost over the remaining number of hogs.

From our perspective here in Manitoba we're bringing in another million hogs a week and spread the cost of the services that we are already offering over.

From the Saskatchewan perspective, they of course have not been immune to the economic challenges of our industry and they were at a point where their service package was very minimal due to the same challenges that we faced in terms of fewer producers and the number of hogs.

So for the Saskatchewan producers, it's really going to enhance the number of services that they have available and it's also going to result in these services being offered at a lower cost than what they were accustomed to paying prior to the consolidation.

H@ms head office will be located in Winnipeg, with a satellite office in Saskatoon,

Mohr expects the new company to be fully operational by January 1, 2010 or sooner.

He notes while the two cooperatives will continue to operate as independent entities, down the road, the two could end up merging.