Pro-Farm couples a low cost structure with a corporate culture that is driven by attention to detail, innovation, and quality which allows us to offer maximum value to retailers that are looking to increase margins and market share. At Pro-Farm we stand behind what we manufacture and our entire management team and workforce is incentivised on quality performance so everybody has a vested interest in the end consumer being completely satisfied.
Growing up on an acreage and hobby farm, Jonathan Peters (co-founder) had an early appreciation for dependable ranch equipment at an affordable price. Shortly after graduating from business school in 2001, Jonathan along with long time family friend, Kevin Wang, identified Kevin’s home town of Nanjing, China as the ideal place to develop a line of quality livestock equipment. Pro-Farm was born out of need for more economically priced livestock handling equipment in 2003.
In late 2006, we developed a private label line for several of the largest Canadian Co-operatives and the product line continues to drive profit growth and market share for these organizations.
In January of 2008, our factory’s 65,000 square foot roof completely collapsed under the worst snow fall that Central China has experienced in over 50 years. The entire workforce and management pitched in to remove the debris and salvage equipment over the Chinese New Year holiday. Once the roof was rebuilt several months later the workforce grew to 80 plus workers, which required an enhancement of our quality control systems. Our team designed and implemented a simple yet effective quality control system in a country that is dominated by piece rate pay. In conjunction with managers and QC engineers, workers downstream in production who identify quality problems receive a piece rate bonus which in turn is deducted from the worker who caused the problem. This system combined with intensive training for new workers and a full time quality control engineer has made our workers very accountable and reduced our quality problems to negligible levels.
As a direct result of these improvements, in 2009 and 2010, we were approved as Mid-States and Wheatbelt vendors respectively.
In late 2012, we built a new 120,000 square foot facility which has increased our production capacity and greatly improved working and living conditions allowing us to recruit more skilled workers. |
