By Bruce Cochrane
The Saskatchewan Pork Development Board is encouraging the province's pork producers to take advantage of support being made available through the Saskatchewan Swine Transport Biosecurity Program for biosecurity improvements.
Under the Saskatchewan Swine Transport Biosecurity Program, Saskatchewan pork producers enrolled in CQA are eligible to receive up to $300 to help offset the cost of a veterinary visit to the farm and up to $700 for truck inspections done by a veterinarian or approved inspector.
Harvey Wagner, the manager of producer services with Sask Pork, explains the program is the third phase of Growing Forward 2 programming to help improve biosecurity.
Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
The first two years provided funding for veterinary visits and improvements to the farm, basically things that would improve biosecurity on the farm whether that be doors, rodent control, sanitation equipment and that type of thing.
This year, because of PED, the focus for the biosecurity program is transportation.
The next phase is to get our producers to understand and be trained up in knowing what a high level of biosecurity looks like in their transport vehicles. It's been, I think, a bit of a weak link.
One of the things that we have is this advantage in western Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan, where there's huge distances between farms, so the only way that you're going to bring a disease into a farm is either through live animals, or on the back of a truck, or on people's clothing, or footwear. If you pay attention to those details you can eliminate it.
We think the most important way of spread right now is by transport vehicles and we really want to address that and make sure those trucks are clean when they back up to the barn.
Wagner notes the program runs between August 1, 2014 and July 31, 2015.
He stresses applications must be received by Sask Pork by August 5.
Source: Farmscape