Farmscape for September 6, 2007  (Episode 2582)

The Canadian Pork Council is confident a new federal program to combat swine disease will go a long way toward protecting Canada's reputation as a reliable supplier of high quality pork.

Last month Agriculture and Agrifood Canada announced a 76 million dollar program to combat disease, particularly Porcine Circovirus Associated Diseases, in the swine industry.

Funding will be provided for inoculating herds, research into the disease, the development of biosecurity best practices and the creation of long term disease surveillance strategies.

Canadian Pork Council President Clare Schlegel says the package will definitely help protect Canada's international reputation in the area of animal health.

Clip-Clare Schlegel-Canadian Pork Council 

Clearly it'll help to raise the health of our herd.

Our reputation world wide is based on sound animal health in this country.

We're one of the highest animal health countries in the entire world.

There's only a few other countries that can boast about that like Canada can.

We have wide open spaces in general.

Our pig herds are generally quite diverse, spread apart from each other, and so we believe the entire package will help to sustain and maintain that.

Now saying that it sounds kind of hollow because each of us on the farm are well aware of problems on a daily basis as any of us are in the human population but still, as an aggregate, Canada has a very high health pig herd and we want to maintain that.

The first phase of the package, the inoculation strategy, will be rolled out over the next four time five months and will include financial assistance for producers who have already and who will be vaccinating their herds against the disease.

Schlegel notes about 30 million pigs are farrowed in Canada per year and he estimates between 30 and 60 percent of those pigs are inoculated at this point.

He expects details of the inoculation strategy to be made available to producers later this month.

For Farmscape.Ca. I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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