By Bruce Cochrane
The chair of Swine Innovation Porc says swine industry research being conducted in partnership with the federal and provincial governments is focusing on improving the global competitiveness of Canada's pork producers.
Under Growing Forward 2, funding provided by the federal and provincial governments to support research must be matched by industry.
Last month pork producer organizations in seven provinces agreed to contribute funding to support research being conducted through Swine Innovation Porc.
Swine Innovation Porc chair Stewart Cressman says it doesn't benefit the industry if new results don't filter down to the end user, so any research that is done must be meaningful to all segments of value chain especially the producers.
Stewart Cressman-Swine Innovation Porc:
Certainly the producers are putting the majority of money on the line through the different provincial pork associations and so we want to have research that is meaningful to them and we have what's called research pull, and one way to make sure you have research pull is that you have the different pork associations vested in the research aware of it.
When you have results they're assisting you in delivering those results to the different farms across this country and they either save some costs in production or increasing the amount that is produced per unit of input or increasing the value of the pork that is being produced, differentiating it in one way or another so that we can compete better against different countries that are competing internationally to sell pork.
I think those are all areas that we see as key in terms of delivering results that will improve the competitiveness of our industry.
Source: Farmscape