Nestled among the ocean of grain fields northeast of Calgary lies the site of a mixed farm that seeded and grew an industry.
Roughly seven decades have passed since Stan and Flo Price embarked on a farming venture that would bring PIC to Canada from its home in the United Kingdom, and then create a group of companies that raise pigs and market pork in Canada and around the world. The Sunterra Group of Companies – still owned and operated by the Price family – has grown to include a chain of food markets in Alberta, finishing barns and a research centre in the United States, a processing plant at Trochu (temporarily closed after a fire earlier this year), a massive greenhouse at the home site near Acme and a joint venture to process specialty meats on that same site, in collaboration with the Simonini family of Modena, Italy.

The farm’s swine venture was founded in the 1960s and grew to a 500-sow barn at a time when it was rare in Alberta to find a farm with more than 100 sows. Most farms with hogs kept between 25 and 50 sows, and there were a few that had up to 150, says Jim Haggins, who was named Western Canada sales manager for PIC Canada in 1996.
Stan and Flo broke the mould when they connected with Ken Woolley, leader of the Oxfordshire, England-based group who had founded PIC (the Pig Improvement Company) in 1962.
PIC’s ground-breaking pyramid breeding strategy was based on crossbreeding females selected from purebred lines to produce F1 gilts for sale to commercial producers.
The Prices’ had been collaborating closely with Howard Fredeen and his team at the Lacombe Research Centre, where select sows had been bred up to create the Lacombe pig, says son Dave.
“At that time, my parents were doing high health status and had purebred breeding stock here, and so (Ken Woolley) came and visited and it kind of cascaded into a series of connections and ultimately a business relationship with the family,” Dave said in an interview with Prairie Hog Country.
A deal was struck in 1970 to form Pig Improvement (Canada) Ltd, involving Fredeen and veterinarian Jack Greenway, along with Stan, Flo and Dave Price. Dave – head of the Price family’s hog operations – moved to the United Kingdom for a time to learn more about the business from Woolley, whose son, Ben later emigrated to Canada to join Sunterra Farms.
Now an industry standard, PIC’s model was an unusual concept at the time and was subject to heavy criticism from Canadian producers, says Haggins.
“A lot of people thought they would go broke . . . but they made it a success. (They) put together a sales team just to work with commercial producers and sell breeding stock and so on. They basically sold the concept of crossbreeding for added productivity, whether it be added female productivity and litter size or added productivity and growth rate,” he said in an interview with Prairie Hog Country.
“They were very instrumental in the success of Pig Improvement Company in the UK because they were the primary supplier of seed stock as things started in a lot of different countries.”

Stan, Flo and their seven offspring continued to build the business upwards and outwards over the ensuing years, expanding into markets in Japan and purchasing facilities in the United States to finish and market their weaners. With both parents now passed on, those offspring have remained in the family business, some directly involved in operations and others as investors.

Haggins stayed with the Price farming operations after they sold PIC to American investors in 1998. That deal generated funds to expand the remaining operations under their current name, Sunterra, coined by Flo Price.

The Sunterra Group of Companies, ever evolving, is currently comprised of Sunterra Farms, established in 1970; Sunterra Meats and Sunterra Markets in 1990, Soleterra d’Italia in 2016 and Sunterra Greenhouse in 2020.
Located beside the greenhouse at Acme, the Soleterra d’Italia processing plant specializes in Italian-style salamis, prosciutto and dry-cured meats that are now marketed around the world.
Dave says his parents entered every venture with a readiness to innovate and a willingness to collaborate with others who shared their vision.
“Very few (producers) had specialized in one particular area, but the 60s and into the 70s kind of changed things; the ability to do more careful research and selection on genetic improvement, in the pig industry especially, and being able to manage and sustain high-health-status animals. The combination of those two things really created an opportunity for the pork industry to move from sort of a part-time piece of a mixed farm into more specialization,” he said.
“Along with that specialization came the opportunities to improve the product quality and also its efficiency in terms of how cost-competitive pork could really be in the international market.”
Canada’s domestic market during Sunterra’s early days was much smaller than its production capacity, hence the need to find discriminating markets, says Dave.
Industry leaders like his father travelled the world seeking opportunities, which is how he was able to attract relationships with buyers in Japan. Consumers there were buying more pork than their country could produce, providing a good market for high-quality Canadian pork, says Dave.
“Where the focus was becoming much higher on health status and genetic improvement, our family and our friends had the advantage of being able to capitalize on that opportunity,” he said.

PIC’s breeding pyramid was introduced in Alberta at a time when swine breeders were still displaying their stock at live shows. To maintain their high-health status, the Prices’ would then have to send their show animals for slaughter, because they could not be returned to a farm.
Participation in the PIC program sent them along an entirely different road, selling seed stock sight unseen and based on genetics.
At that same time, Stan Price and Howard Fredeen were working with the processors and the federal government to change the way hogs were graded, says Dave.
Fredeen and his team had created a system that relied on measurements and data rather than visual cues to evaluate carcass quality of a live animal. The switch to science-base evaluations was a tremendous improvement over common practice in the US, he said.
“And so, when we were focusing on discriminating markets like Japan, we were able to produce product for them that was better in terms of meat quality and quantity in a carcass that was better than virtually anybody else in the world. The Danes were doing this similar thing, but obviously we had a locational advantage in working with Japan.”
Dave says he and his family were always careful within the PIC breeding pyramid to ensure that each level of business interaction was a win-win situation.
“Part of the time in transition, obviously in any business world, when there’s things changing fast, you have some players that are committed to the long term and you have other players who see an opportunity in the short run and sort of get what they can out of it in a hurry and not worry about the future.”
Sunterra’s commitment to remaining a strong player in the long term remains as a third generation of Prices’ enters the family business.
“It’s an industry success story, a Canadian industry success story, because their program spread across the country and a lot of other companies started their crossbreeding (strategy),” said Haggins.
Price says the commitment of field men who worked with the multipliers and with customers played a huge role, especially under Haggins’s leadership.
“They were the ones (who) ensured that the customers were successful with a very new, high-performance animal in conditions that were a challenge and had to evolve with changing times,” he wrote in an email to Prairie Hog Country. •
— By Brenda Kossowan
All photos courtesy of Sunterra