Farmscape for April 27, 2018

A Professor of Applied Swine Nutrition with Iowa State University says, when considering the adoption of new technologies or management strategies, it's important set priorities.
The modern age of the internet and social media has resulted in an explosion of new information.
Dr. John Patience, a Professor in Applied Swine Nutrition with Iowa State University, says the resulting challenge is separating the important information from the unimportant and the accurate from the inaccurate.

Clip-Dr. John Patience-Iowa State University:
From a pork producer's point of view you can only do so much.
You can't try to adapt or adopt every new technology that comes down the pipe.
You can't expect of yourself to do more than what you really are capable of because we all have limitations.
A limitation could be time.
I just don't have time to do all the things I know I should do.
I may not have money to do some of the things that I think should be done.
I need more money and I just don't have that much money available to do those renovations or to make that investment in a new technology.
What we have to do then is we have to look at the available new information that's out there or new opportunities and say okay here's the things that I think are really important for the success of my farm and I'm going to prioritize them because there's 10 on the list and I can't do 10 in one year.
I don't have the money and I don't have the time.
I think I can do two so I'm going to pick the two that I think are going to have the greatest impact long term and I'm going to do them this year and then next year I'll do the next two and then the year after I'll do the next two.
I think we run the risk of trying doing too much and maybe we don't do it as well as we should or we just burn ourselves out.
I think one of the biggest problems in farming is that people work so hard for so long that they risk burnout.

Dr. Patience says, to the best of our ability, we need to temper our workload and we temper our expectations of ourselves.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork