A pilot project underway in Saskatchewan is assessing technology designed to track the movement of swine transport vehicles.Guelph based Farm Health Guardian and the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board are collaborating on a pilot project to assess the performance of various truck movement recording technologies.Farm Health Guardian CEO Rob Hannam says the goal to see how the company's biosecurity software can be used to view truck movements on and off the farm.
Clip-Rob Hannam-Farm Health Guardian:
The Saskatchewan pilot really is testing new technology related to monitoring the movement of trucks.
What better place than to try in Saskatchewan where some farms are close to an urban centre, they're well connected through a GPS or cell signal.
But many of the farms, especially swine farms, we want them to be more remote, and so they're in areas with poor cell reception or poor WIFI areas so it's important to test new technologies they can use in those specific areas in rural settings.We've got about 20 swine farms and related businesses in Saskatchewan involved.
The way we got started is we approached the Sask Pork Development Board and we said we'd like to try this new technology and made a presentation to their Board of Directors.One of the criteria is we wanted different types of operations to see how different producers would use it.
We ended up having the Prairie Swine Centre, a research organization, they do applied research so that's an important one.
It's near Saskatoon.We've got independent producers, a feed mill, we've got one of the larger producers that has multiple farms so they have their own internal IT systems and a genetics company as well and their sites are more remote and spread out.
We wanted to get a cross section and that's what we got among those 20 farms.
Hannam expects the project to conclude this fall, once these different technologies and devices have run for a few months in real world conditions, at which point a final report will be issued.
Source : Farmscape.ca