The chair of Manitoba Pork says swine health issues and the need to better control disease has emerged as a key issue during discussions with pork producers in Minnesota and Iowa.
As part of a trade advocacy mission a delegation representing Manitoba Pork travelled to Minneapolis last week for the Minnesota Pork Congress and is in Des Moines this week for the Iowa Pork Congress.
Manitoba Pork chair Karl Kynoch says the visit allows members of the delegation to interact directly with U.S. producers, industry leaders, federal and state government representatives and other industry stakeholders to discuss issues of mutual concern.
One of the big issues going forward is going to be health, how do we manage health.
We believe that the PED has really brought that to a forefront.
In hindsight of that, what we’re currently working on in back Manitoba is Manitoba is working with the three western provinces together to develop a Swine Health Intelligence Network and start gathering information and collecting it and pooling it on new diseases that come in and how they’re spreading.
In discussions last week in Minnesota and discussions again today here in Iowa we’re letting those boards know what we’re doing and what we’re suggesting is that down the road once we get these systems up and running is that we start interacting not only just in Canada but we start interacting with Minnesota and with Iowa as we have a lot of trade going back and forth.
We’ve found out now that they’re also kind of heading down that same road and there’s a huge amount of support to work together with the states and with Canada.
Everybody is really on side to work together to see what we can do about developing a very good disease network and when a disease hits the U.S. or hits Canada it just allows us a lot better chance to be able to get it under control sooner.
Kynoch says there’s a realization on both sides of the border that there is a real need to develop this information system and start monitoring disease in a better fashion to get a handle on them sooner.
