Farmscape for November 23, 2012

Pork producers across Canada are being encouraged to provide their input to assist in an effort intended to come up with ideas for improving the standards, guidelines and codes that govern new swine barn construction.
As part of a project being coordinated by Swine Innovation Porc, the Prairie Swine Centre, in partnership with CDPQ, is surveying pork producers across Canada to identify problem areas in existing swine barns and the associated standards, guidelines or codes.
The survey results will be used to develop improved codes and standards for new barn construction and best management practices.
Prairie Swine Centre president and CEO Lee Whittington says pork producers have pointed out there are parts of their barns that work quite well and other parts that don't.

Clip-Lee Whittington-Prairie Swine Centre:
The project was started to look at all of the potential areas and there's five basic systems that operate in the barn.
We look at the physical building structure as being the first system, the mechanical system so all of that ventilation and pumps that operate within the barn, the manure system because it's not only mechanical, it also has manure channels and scrapers etcetera, the electrical system and the animal handling system, the animal handling system being things such as width of alleyways.
We looked at these five different areas and looking to know whether or not there were codes or standards or best management practices that exist for designing those systems and for how to operate them most efficiently.
The purpose of the whole project then was to see, could we reduce our cost of production or improve our use of labor by having better codes, standards, systems, best management practices, within these five systems.

For more information or to take part in the survey visit standardizationproject.questionpro.com or prairieswine.com.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council