By Bruce Cochrane.
Swine Innovation Porc has announced letters of intent are now being accepted for research proposals under the Swine Cluster 3 program.
Swine Innovation Porc is inviting researchers to submit letters of intent for proposals under the Swine Cluster 3 Research Program expected under Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's next Agricultural Policy Framework.
The current Federal Provincial Territorial research funding agreement will expire March 31, 2018.
Swine Innovation Porc Chair Stewart Cressman says the expectation is that there will be a follow up five year program which will begin April 1, 2018.
Stewart Cressman-Swine Innovation Porc:
We've been told by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to operate under the assumption there will be another cluster program.
Certainly it's our opinion and their opinion, after coming out of a two and a half day meeting in Ottawa with the 14 other clusters, that this is an extremely important program and so we're looking at getting our planning in place and our research program put together so that we're fully prepared to take advantage of this program.
We may not have all the details and those guidelines may in fact be over a year, a year and a half away but we want to make sure pork is well positioned to take advantage of the program very quickly after it's launched.
The whole intent is to try to have a program that doesn't have a gap year that has occurred in the past.
With that it requires a lead time to get the research program developed, submitted, evaluated by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and then the research community engaged in April the first to initiate their research projects.
Source: Farmscape