Manitoba Pork Hosts Virtual Townhall To Address PED Outbreak

Dec 08, 2021

As of Tuesday, Manitoba Pork was reporting 21 cases of the PED virus in 2021.

Manager of Swine Health Programs Jenelle Hamblin says it's unusual to see an outbreak start this late in the year.

"It's something that we haven't seen before. It's new. Cases in Manitoba have typically started in the April-May-June timeframe is when we've seen cases start in previous outbreaks. We've seen cases in October before but they've typically been linked to other cases that had come on earlier. To start an outbreak at the end of October and lead here into December is definitely a new occurrence for us here in Manitoba and looking at these risk factors through a slightly different lens being that it's a different season, different environmental factors are at play."

The majority of the 21 cases are in the southeast part of the province.

Manitoba Pork held a virtual townhall Tuesday to update producers on the situation.

The organization is reminding producers to practice strong biosecurity.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.