By Bruce Cochrane
The vice-chair of Swine Innovation Porc says research efforts funded through Growing Forward have helped improve the level of collaboration among scientists across Canada.
The Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster, or Swine Innovation Porc, was created to take advantage of funding being made available through the federal Growing Forward program to various commodities to advance national research and development programs.
Results of some of the projects funded through the initiative are being presented as part of the 2013 Banff Pork Seminar.
Swine Innovation Porc vice-chair Stewart Cressman says, in the past, swine research was conducted primarily on a regional basis raising concern that some research efforts were being duplicated.
Stewart Cressman-Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster:
I think one of the key outcomes that we've seen that has been beneficial is getting individual researchers out of their individual silos and working collaboratively with one another in different institutions across Canada, university researchers working with Agriculture and Agri-food researchers and vica versa and so, as a result you have information passing between them and I think at the end of the day the collaborative approach benefits both industry and the research community.
We're just coming to the conclusion of most of these research programs now.
Last year there were some preliminary results that were presented here at Banff.
This year there's going to be more final results being presented.
Really the job that we have now is doing the knowledge transfer and taking that new knowledge and that new information and getting it in the hands of the pork value chain here in Canada, the producers primarily but other feed manufacturers, equipment manufacturers so that they have this new knowledge so that the information can be used for the benefit of the industry.
Cressman adds these projects also provide training for masters and PhD students which provides the succession planning for the next generation of researchers.
Source: Farmscape