The top ten winners of the 2014 Prairie Livestock Expo Pork Quality Competition and their charities if choice will share approximately 27 thousand dollars in prize money.
The winners of 2014 Pork Quality Competition, held in conjunction with Prairie Livestock Expo in Winnipeg, will be named this afternoon.
Dennis Stevenson, a territory sales manager with Zoetis and a member of the Prairie Livestock Expo organizing committee, notes entries are judged according to criteria used for grading at Manitoba's pork processing plants and the top ten are on display at the event.
Dennis Stevenson-Zoetis:
We have just under 40 entries this year from all of Manitoba I guess.
The majority of the entrants would be from the colony farms.
One of the great things about this competition is it's sponsored by many people across the province of Manitoba and some of these companies are national like Zoetis where the sponsorship is brought in.
This year we've got just over 27 thousand dollars in sponsorships.
All of the entrants fill out a form and they choose a charity to donate their winnings to.
Not all of the winnings go to charity but a large portion.
It's the choice of entrants.
For sure 50 percent of all the prize money goes to the charities and I believe in previous years now almost 90 plus percent of all the winnings have gone to charity.
Along with all the meat is donated to Winnipeg harvest or Siloam Mission or any of those types of things to feed the needy at Christmas.
Since the Pork Quality Competition was introduced in 1996 more than 345 thousand dollars have been donated to international, national, rural and urban charities and more than 47 thousand kilograms of pork have been donated to Manitoba food banks.
Source: Farmscape