Maple Lodge Farms and its partner, Eden Valley co-operative,
have been granted $1 million by the Nova Scotia government to buy equipment for
their joint-venture poultry processing plant at Berwick.
They have invested about $40 million renovating and
improving the plant that was a hog-slaughtering and pork-processing facility
owned by Maple Leaf Foods Inc.
It seems strange to me that taxpayers' money is going into poultry processing in a region that will soon have excess capacity.
The plant at Berwick was known as Larsen Prepared Meats. Maple Leaf shut it
down as part of its nation-wide restructuring program that features the closing
of most meat-processing plants and consolidation of operations in a new plant
under construction at Hamilton, Ont.
Maple Lodge is the second-biggest poultry-processing
business in Ontario and has been embroiled in controversy in New Brunswick
where it is struggling to keep its Nadeau Poultry Ltd. plant running.
Westco has captured the lion’s share of chicken production
in the province and has a joint venture with Olymel, the dominant poultry
processor in Quebec, to build a new plant in New Brunswick.s
That leaves New Brunswick with far too much poultry-processing capacity.
Maple Lodge has survived by processing Nova Scotia chicken
at its Nadeau Poultry plant. Now it is aggressively seeking production
contracts with Quebec producers to keep Nadeau going after the plant at
Berwick opens.
The government said in a news release that its grant will be
used to buy equipment that will help
boost the plant’s capacity by 40 per cent to 12,000 chickens per hour and to
double turkey-processing capacity to 2,500 per hour.
