The chair of Swine Innovation Porc says changes in the approach to funding research conducted on behalf of Canada’s pork industry have fostered a much greater level of communication and collaboration among the researchers and research facilities that conduct that research.
Swine Innovation Porc, the research and development arm of the Canadian Pork Council, is funded through a 13 million dollar allotment from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through Growing Forward-2 with a minimum of 25 percent of the cost of approved projects provided by industry.
Swine Innovation Porc chair Stewart Cressman says the main advantage of this approach has been that it fosters collaboration among different sectors.
The tendency has always been that research is often done in silos and research monies are very competitive and often we’ve had competitive research funds and looked at them as a way of ensuring the quality of research is very high.
The down side of that is that you have individual researchers maybe not willing to work with one another across institutions.
One of the advantages and one of the things we’ve put in place, and I must credit the researchers for seeing this as important too, is sitting down and talking about objectives initially and what each component would be done where across the country.
I can think of some of the nutrition work that is being done currently and it’s distributed across the University of Alberta., University of Saskatchewan, University of Manitoba, here at Guelph in Ontario and at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Canada’s research centre in Sherbrook.
Cressman says the program brings together public, university and industry researchers and through collaboration and dialogue builds on the strengths of the different research stations.
As well, he says, involving industry partners ensures the importance of the research to industry is a factor creating research pull so the results move seamlessly into industry applications.
