Farmscape for January 12, 2022

A Research Scientist with the Prairie Swine Centre says the wide variety of swine transport trailers means uniform cleaning and disinfection procedures are unlikely.
To help reduce the cost and speed up the cleaning of swine transport trailers, the Prairie Swine Centre, in partnership with Swine Innovation Porc, is developing new swine transport trailer design guidelines.
Dr. Bernardo Predicala, a Research Scientist Engineering with the Prairie Swine Centre, says there's a wide variety of swine transport trailers and they tend to be highly customised so even trailers from the same manufacturer will be different.

Clip-Dr. Bernardo Predicala-Prairie Swine Centre:
The most common types of trailers being used to today can be roughly categorised into three types.
One of them is the double deck pot bellied trailers which are used for transporting both cattle and pigs.
Then we have the straight deck trailers which can have two to four decks and then we have also the multi deck hydraulic trailers.
Each of these types have advantages and disadvantages.
The potbellied are favoured by the truckers because of the dual use but they are also very difficult to clean and unloading and loading is a big challenge for pigs because they have mega shaped ramps to get to the different compartments.
Straight backs are a bit better for loading and unloading because the pigs just go in and out on the straight floor but they also give up on the loading capacity.
It's also more of a challenge to clean, especially with those four decks that have six heights providing very little headroom for the pressure washer.
The hydraulic deck trailers have addressed those concerns with regards to loading and unloading and somewhat in cleaning the main decks but the hydraulics and the cable systems also add to the complication of getting them properly cleaned and sanitised.
Of course these hydraulic trailers are also more expensive and are more technically complicated than the other types.

Dr. Predicala notes an app is being developed that will calculate whether a particular design will rate high or low in terms of the cleanability, safety and animal welfare.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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