Farmscape for December 22, 2017

The University of Manitoba will step up efforts to build awareness of its research into the sustainability of livestock production.
The National Centre for Livestock and the Environment brings together animal, soil, plant and food scientists, economists and engineers to conduct research aimed at improving the environmental and overall sustainability of animal agriculture focusing on pigs and cattle.
Christine Rawluk, the Research Coordinator with the National Centre for Livestock and the Environment, says this past year the overall focus of NCLE and the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences has been wrapping up research projects supported under Growing Forward 2 and preparing proposals for the next five year block of funding through the agricultural cluster programs under the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, such as Swine Innovation Porc.

Clip-Christine Rawluk-University of Manitoba:
Specifically with swine related research the key focus areas have been and will continue to be swine nutrition and health, PED virus research, barn design features for group housed sows, specifically flooring, and manure management research.
For example, Swine Nutritionists Martin Nyachoti and Chengbo Yang lead research to identify feed ingredients, feed additives, alternatives to antibiotics for optimal pig health.
Ehsan Khafipour leads the PED virus research program and gut microbiome research.
Laurie Connor and Qiang Zhang in Biosystems Engineering collaborate on sow housing research and Don Flaten leads the current manure management research.
We will be running a series of research updates through Chop Talk and Farmscape in the new year providing more detail on these and other projects.
We will also feature some of the ways in which we are spreading awareness of research findings through a variety of communication avenues, including developing environmental focus programming for high school students.

Rawluk says the pork sector has been highly supportive of the work as government research funding agencies have increased requirements for industry to contribute directly to research projects as a way of confirming that it sees a value to research being proposed.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork