Farmscape for March 9, 2016

The Regional Marketing and Technical Services Manager with AcuShot Needle-Free says pork producers and processors who have adopted needle-free technology can assure their customers they've eliminated any possibility of needle fragments in their products.
An increasing number of pork producers and processors are opting for needle-free administration of vaccines, medications, and mineral supplements to pigs to eliminate any possibility of needle fragments ending up in the meat.
Mike Agar, the Regional Marketing and Technical Services Manager with AcuShot Needle-Free, says the highest use of needle-free technology is to administer iron supplements or vaccines to high numbers of young pigs.

Clip-Mike Agar-AcuShot Needle-Free:
Let's say you've got a couple thousand pigs to vaccinate and you have a limited amount of time and you've got to use needles, possibly repeatedly.
They may get bent or broken in these animals so, in high volume vaccination situations such as nursery pigs getting vaccinated for circovirus, you're vaccinating hundreds to thousands of pigs at one time.
Needle-free has been adopted there more readily to mitigate the probability that a needle is going to be broken off into one of these animals and then which one do you know that it occurred in.
You don't want that to end up on the food line and have somebody have to deal with that in their roast or their pork chops or what ever.
So the processors see this as an opportunity to mitigate risk and optimize food safety.
What's driving this mostly is demand in market places such as the Asian markets where they want a guarantee of food safety from their suppliers and we have a number of commercial processors in this country, in particular in Manitoba, that are supplying into those markets where they want to be able to give those guarantees and that's why they've chosen to go needle-free.

Agar says where needle-free is being used they're not having broken needles.
He says that risk has been removed so the consumer of those products coming from those establishments is getting something that can be relied on.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork