By Bruce Cochrane.
The President and CEO says the value of swine industry supported research being conducted by the Prairie Swine Centre is being demonstrated through improved profitability among swine producers as well as improved animal welfare, environmental sustainability and odor mitigation.
The Saskatoon based Prairie Swine Centre is celebrating "25 Years of Making Research Work."
Lee Whittington, the President and CEO of the Prairie Swine Centre, says the centre's three core focus areas include, nutrition, engineering and behavior and in association with other institutions, organizations and agencies across Canada works in other areas such as vaccine development and greenhouse gas reduction.
Lee Whittington-Prairie Swine Centre:
Starting at home, because that's who pays us to exist, is the pork producers contribute significantly, the Government of Saskatchewan contributes significantly and the Government of Canada so that's our key audience.
One of the things that we do is we try to look at what is the potential net income value so we actually model every year all the results that we've developed over the past year.
Right now, if you look at our five years average, it's four dollars and 10 cents per pig marketed in benefit if you took what we do and you applied it all on your farm today.
The benefit of having something like a swine centre is that there's an improvement in the net income available to any pork producer who wants to embrace new technology quicker and that doesn't even include all of what we would call sustainability issues, animal welfare, transportation, odor mitigation.
There's activities in those things that are harder to quantify with dollars but, as we know, they are some of the key issues that are facing the industry in the future.
Whittington says the most important thing, when we walk into our barns every day, is the health and well being of our people and the health and well being of our animals.
Source: Farmscape