Hog genetics firm Hypor JV has completed the largest-ever shipment of Canadian hogs into China by air, the company reported Wednesday.
Hypor, the Kitchener, Ont.-based swine breeding arm of Dutch livestock firm Hendrix Genetics, shipped 816 hogs by truck from its breeding operations at Ituna and Abernethy in southeastern Saskatchewan, to Chicago.
There the animals were loaded in custom-built crates onto a Boeing 747 to Qingdao in China’s Shandong province, where they arrived Oct. 16. From there, the high-health hogs were unloaded, watered, fed and hauled on 15 flatbed trucks to Hypor’s joint-venture farms in China.
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On arrival, the trucks and truckers were cleaned and disinfected. The animals were shipped at near-breeding age and will be ready to breed when they come out of quarantine, said Hypor China manager Marc Broadbent.
All 816 animals arrived alive and in good health, he said, and are expected to be put into production of offspring by mid-December.
Although the company has shipped hogs to China by air nine times previously, Broadbent said officials with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed this to be the largest shipment of its kind to China by air.
Hypor plans to move 1,500 more animals by air to China in March, Broadbent said, but it’s not yet known how large the shipments will be.
The logistics of this size of shipment are “incredible,” Broadbent said, but the investment of time and money speak to the value of the breeding stock and the value of the project.
