One of Those Bricks in My Foundation: Alumni Feature

What began under challenging circumstances for Denis Vielfaure became the motivation for a lifetime of success.

The Assiniboine grad always loved agriculture and always expected to make it his career. And, thanks to the love and support of his parents and two brothers, the co-founder of HyLife Foods has made Manitoba agriculture history.

In the late 1970s, Denis and his two brothers, Paul and Claude, were living on the family farm near La Broquerie when an economic recession caused the farm to experience struggles. That crisis led young Denis to make a decision that would forever change his life.

“I was in grade 12 in high school,” he says, “and my dad said you’vegot to find something else to do so that we can get this back on the road. I enjoyed the mechanical side of things, so I decided to go and do my farm machinery mechanics at [Assiniboine] in Brandon in the fall of 1980.”

After one year of classes at Assiniboine, followed by three years of apprenticeship, he graduated with a trade certificate. That’s not all he accomplished, however.

“Eventually, the farm economics got better and, while I was in school, my older brother Paul and myself— I was 18— we went to Farm Credit Corporation and we each borrowed $240,000.” “It was crazy,” he says. “We had no equity. I had $2,000 in my bank account and Paul was probably the same. But because of the financial distress, the banks had all these keys to farms, so they were eager to help young farmers get into it. So, with my dad’s co-signature, we borrowed almost $500,000. That was while I was taking my course at [Assiniboine]. So, we bought back the hog farm.”

“That’s how we got going again, and after I finished my course, I got on the farm and we were having fun.” That was just the beginning. “My younger brother (Claude) was involved at that time also, and we kept building barns. Our goal was to each own our own hog barn and we accomplished that by 1992.”

The three Vielfaure brothers then partnered with another area farmer, Don Janzen. “From there on, it just took off”, Denis says.

“We were raising about a million hogs a year, and then we started looking into further processing. We finally ended up buying the Neepawa plant from the Springfield Colony. We were buying some of the assets that were there, but the important part was the license to operate a processing plant.”

“When we took it over, there were 300-ish people at the plant and, by the time we were done growing, there were 1,500 employees in Neepawa.”

After building HyLife into a thriving organization with thousands of employees, Denis, Claude and Don—Paul had passed away a few years earlier—were approached by a Thailand company that wanted to invest in a protein company.

“We’d had such a great journey, we decided that maybe it was time to move on. We built a great management team, there’s lots of power to keep the company going. So, we decided to sell the company at the end of 2019. So, Don, Claude and myself, we retired at that time and the rest of the management team stayed behind.” Looking back to his time at Assiniboine, Denis says that “Timing in life is important, and it’s all these little bricks that build every one’s own foundation. Assiniboine was one of those bricks in my foundation. It broadened not only the technical skills, but also helped me grow as a young man with the mix of students and being away from home.”

He adds that “All those little things when you’re 18 years old, it influences your character, how you act and react in life. And meeting great people like Mr. Roy Sobchuk, he left a mark in my world. I know it’s not Assiniboine directly, but it is. It’s the culture of Assiniboine.”

Asked what advice he would give his younger self, Denis says “Work hard, but you’ve got to manage your sacrifices. It’s hard to find that work-life balance when you’re going full-out, but you’ve got to take some risks and go for it from there.”

“Do whatever you want to do in life as long as you’re enjoying it, but be doing something. Go out there and enjoy it – get everything you can out of it.”