New tools under development to help identify superior production systems
New tools being developed by the Prairie Swine Centre will help pork producers select the system that will best suit their needs when building or renovating swine barns.
Research being conducted by the Prairie Swine Centre on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc focuses on the Evaluation and Development of Standards for Swine Production Systems.
Dr. Bernardo Predicala, a research scientist engineering with the Prairie Swine Centre, says the first step is to identify existing standards or guidelines, benchmark existing systems and how they perform against these existing standards and from there determine where these standards are sufficient, where standards are absent and where standards need to be improved.
If a producer is going to put up a new barn or renovate a barn then this new set of standards would help that producer in coming up with the best choices for the different systems that the producer is going to put up.
At the end our target here is to come up with some kind of a check list for different systems in a barn such that when a producer needs to build this particular system or a new barn then the producer can go to this check list and see which standards or guidelines are applicable to this specific system so that the producer can choose from them and apply this standard in the new barn.
Dr. Predicala says, because there’s a wide variability in swine production systems, we need to develop universal criteria for comparing the performance of these different systems and for that input will be needed from various stakeholders including producers, contractors, veterinarians and others.
He says surveys being conducted now will be followed by visits to selected farms, the information gathered through these surveys will be analyzed to identify gaps and areas where improvements are needed, then recommendations for revised standards will be formulated.
