By Bruce Cochrane
The Prairie Swine Centre is preparing to release a new calendar which uses humor to reinforce the importance of biosecurity.
The Prairie Swine Centre and Elanco Animal Health have created a new biosecurity calendar that uses humor to reinforce biosecurity messaging.
The 18 month calendar will be available in English and French with distribution to begin early next month.
Ken Engele, the manager of technology transfer with the Prairie Swine Centre, says the target audience is swine barn workers and the hope is to get calendars into every barn in Canada.
Ken Engele-Prairie Swine Centre Prairie Swine Centre:
Biosecurity is something that's never really gone out of favor.
When PED came to Canada that started reinforcing biosecurity protocols and procedures.
The concept for the calendar actually started back in 1998 to 2000.
The VIDO Swine Technology Group, the biosecurity calendar is something that they had done over a period of 4 years at that time and really the basis of that was to drive home the importance of biosecurity and the value that the front line people have had in maintaining it in their herds.
When we started doing planning for the upcoming technology transfer year last year we also came to the conclusion that profitability in the industry has been pretty good for the last 18 months but, prior to that, it was pretty doom and gloom and there wasn't a whole lot of humor in the industry so this provided a nice unique opportunity of bringing some a humorous messages to a serious topic.
The way the calendar winds up being laid out is, you have a nice little cartoon image that has sort of a funny caption but on the bottom of every cartoon as well is "but seriously folks" so that way it really drives home the point and the influence that people can have in the industry.
Copies of the calendar will be distributed by representatives of the Prairie Swine Centre at conferences and trade shows and by representatives of Elanco or they can be requested directly through the Prairie Swine Centre.
Source: Farmscape