The Prairie Swine Centre has released a new check list designed to assist pork producers in prioritizing investments in the maintenance of their barns.
The Prairie Swine Centre, with the help of FGC Construction in Ontario, has compiled a Swine Barn Integrity Assessment Check List.
Prairie Swine Centre president and CEO Lee Whittington notes we've had ten consecutive months of profitability in the pig industry in Canada and have significantly paid down lines of credit and debt associated with 2005 to 2013 losses and the time is right, where profitability will now meet the fact that we have a great need in the maintenance of buildings so the question is where do I spend my first dollar and that was the motivation for putting together the check list.
Lee Whittington-Prairie Swine Centre:
The whole idea of the check list is a how and what to look for.
It provides a check list approach to ensure that the three key areas in the barn, the structural, utilities and operational aspects of the barn are all examined independently.
The first step I really think is to take a buddy to assist you.
We're all biased in what we observe and we need to have a second set of eyes to help us observe more critically all the different areas of the barn that we're going to go into, and we're going to poke and prod, and we're going to shine a light on to take a look at what is the true level of structural integrity, or the operation of the heaters etceteras.
That is truly the purpose of the check list. It's really to help bring some objectivity to a real mixed bag of all of the things that you could reinvest in the barn. It forces us to look critically at those things and make an assessment of how they're going to impact our business.
Whittington says because we're in control of some of the new debt incurred since 2005 producers are in a position to reasonably start to look at maintenance issues and come up with a realistic time line for getting at them.
The check list can be freely accessed at parairieswine.com.
Source: Farmscape