Farmscape for October 10, 2014

The chair of Manitoba Pork says stepped up biosecurity will be critical to containing any spread of PED as the weather turns colder.
Two cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea have been reported in barns in Manitoba over the past month.
Challenges and opportunities facing western Canada's pork industry will be discussed next month as part of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2014.
Karl Kynoch, the chair of Manitoba Pork, says seeing that many new outbreaks at this time of year due to the fact that the damp cool weather through September has allowed the disease to spread is the industry's biggest challenge right now.

Clip-Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork:
Producers really need to take control of this themselves.
They need to take control of the barn door.
The barn door is where the producer can control what happens inside the barn and outside the barn.
They need to prevent service people from accessing the barn if they don't need to.
If somebody is there to drop off feed for example, those people need to phone ahead, make sure that they're notified they're going to be coming on the yard and they need to go and drop the feed off and not be walking all over the place, do what they have to do and then leave the yard again.
When there's deliveries of semen or other parcels that are coming to the yard these people need to phone ahead and there needs to be arrangements made to try to keep those people out of the barn whether it's meeting at the end of the lane or what ever.
When I say take control of the barn door this is what I mean.
That's your main focus point to be able to stop PED from coming into your barn and being just extremely devastating to your operation.
This really just shows how important it is to keep biosecurity levels up.
We're into that cool damp weather, we're going into the winter time now and it's going to take a lot of really good biosecurity just to try to keep the PED at bay here going forward and just keep it out of the operations.

Kynoch says on the positive side, although we have had new cases of PED, one infected farm has reverted to being negative so there will be a lot of testing to sort out what happened there and the other farms and are working to clean up their barns as well.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council