Farmscape for December 15, 2011   (Episode 4032)

Research being conducted on behalf of the Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster as part of Swine Innovation is expected to be of benefit to pork producers across Canada.

The Prairie Swine Centre in Saskatoon and CDPQ in Quebec are spearheading the implementation of a National Technology Transfer Strategy on behalf of the Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster.

Swine Innovation is a national program funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada involving 14 research projects being conducted by 16 universities and research organizations across Canada.

Prairie Swine Centre Information Services Manager Ken Engele says research is being conducted in areas such as swine nutrition, genomics, welfare and engineering with two main objectives, reducing the cost of production and providing market differentiation of products.

Clip-Ken Engele-Prairie Swine Centre:
If I look at the category of increasing industry competitiveness or reducing cost of production, it's things looking at novel swine feeding programs, looking at the efficiency of feed additives to mitigate mycotoxin impact, looking at new genomic tools to improve meat quality and production efficiencies in swine and looking at development of standardization for swine production systems as well.

In looking at the second category of increasing pork differentiation it would be developing swine welfare assessment programs, looking at different euthanasia techniques in addition to innovative cleaning systems for swine operations as well.

Engele anticipates initial results from some of the projects to be available in a few months while results from the longer term efforts should start coming out in about a year.

He says the ultimate goal is to get the research adopted by industry and information will be communicated through various methods, including seminars, fact sheets and media releases and a special session at the 2012 Banff Pork Seminar scheduled for January 17 to 20.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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