Sask Pork is partnering with Farm Health Guardian on an initiative designed to improve biosecurity during the transport of pigs. Sask Pork and Farm Health Guardian have joined forces to offer the province's pork producers access to real time on farm traceability.
Sask Pork General Manager Mark Ferguson says one of the Saskatchewan pork industry's strengths is the high health of its farms, driven by such things as separation distances between farms, the luxury of lots of space and on farm biosecurity efforts.
Quote-Mark Ferguson-Sask Pork:
The Board of Sask Pork wants to make sure we maintain this advantage.It's a key strategic advantage of our industry so what we're doing is partnering with Farm Health Guardian. They provide digital transport biosecurity technology to commercial farms and what they offer is real time truck movement monitoring.
By being connected to the transport trailers you can speed up our response time if there's ever a disease outbreak or you find disease on a trailer. That's part of their software. The other part is they can track the movement of people, so service providers, staff. There's the ability to use electronic logbooks to track the movements of people in and out of barns which is one of the main risks in our facilities, so that transport truck risk and the people risk.
From Sask Pork's side, if there's ever a disease outbreak or an incident with a potentially contaminated trailer, our ability to figure out where that trailer went, what farms might have been contacted by it going to be significantly enhanced. We'll be able to respond, where it might have taken days before to figure out where a trailer might have gone, we can do that within minutes now with this system.
Ferguson says Sask Pork will provide the software and login information to interested farms and, while the program is voluntary, every farm is encouraged to participate.He says the program will help farms and herd health veterinarians to reduce loss from disease, transport companies will be able to track the movement of their equipment and animals that escape disease will be available for processing.
Source : Farmscape.ca