Swine Innovation Porc says, with many of the research initiatives it has supported over the past three years now coming close to completion, its focus will shift to getting the results of that research out to pork producers.
The Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster Corporation, or Swine Innovation Porc, was incorporated by the Canadian Pork Council in 2010 with funding provided through the federal Growing Forward Program with a mandate of supporting strategic planning for applied research and innovation in the pork sector.
Swine Innovation chair Claude Miville suggests its greatest success has been its ability to bring together scientists across Canada.
We were able to have many researchers from many institutions sit together.
In fact we have more than 25 research institutions, organizations that work with us, universities, AFC research centres and also other research organizations such as Prairie Swine Centre in Saskatoon and CDPQ in Quebec and what is interesting, it’s over 100 researchers.
I could give you examples of topics that we have done research.
For example we work on novel nutritional strategies for piglets, we work on precision feeding for pigs, parity segregated phase feeding for sows, liquid feeding, genomics tools to improve meat quality and we also think that animal welfare and environment is important so we’ve got some projects on animal welfare.
For example we compared three animal welfare assessment programs and we work on water sprinkling for example in trucks for pigs and we also work on air cleaning systems.
These give you an overview of the type of research that we’ve financed for the last three years.
Miville says, with many of these research projects now wrapping up, the focus will shift to accelerating knowledge transfer.
