Training Videos Provide New Swine Barn Workers Orientation Prior to Hands-On Training

The Training Resources Coordinator with the Canadian Pork Council suggests the opportunity to view best husbandry practices before jumping into hands-on training helps new swine barn workers understand the importance of various tasks ahead of being expected to perform them.

An initiative under which the Canadian Pork Council, in collaboration with the provincial pork organizations, producers and other pork sector experts from across Canada developed training resources for swine farm stockpersons will be among the topics discussed as part of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2022 November 15 and 16 in Saskatoon.

Mark Fynn, the training resources coordinator with the Canadian Pork Council, says over 100 videos and printed resources covering 10 topics including biosecurity, humane transport and husbandry practices have been developed to help train new workers.

Clip-Mark Fynn-Canadian Pork Council:

The Canadian Pork Council recognised that pork producers from across Canada were looking for additional tools to help them train and retain barn workers.

The provinces have typically gone about developing these types of things by themselves in the past but there was an opportunity to collaborate more and Canadian Pork Council recognised this and so the project is really about national collaboration getting expert review from across Canada with the best experts possible and then primarily about the development of a bunch of high-quality training resources that we can make available to pork producers.
I've personally managed about a dozen different working groups to tackle each subject and each working group involves six or seven people including at least one producer, often more, but also trying to pull in the best pork sector experts from across Canada to provide the best expertise on the topic we're covering. We've literally had hundreds of people from across Canada involved in developing these training resources.

Fynn says these resources provide an opportunity to standardise training across the farm and across the sector and he notes workers that receive good training tend to want to stick around longer.