Officials of the Prairie Swine Centre are confident the sale of the PSC Elstow Research Farm will create new opportunities for collaborative research.
Constructed in 2000, the PSC Elstow Research Farm consists of a 600 sow farrow to finish research facility, a small off-site unit and a feed mill however the economic challenges facing the Canadian pork industry forced its closure last fall.
Prairie Swine Centre president and CEO Lee Whittington says the sale of the facility to United Kingdom based JSR Genetics will allow the farm to resume its original mandate.
The farm will become a nucleus unit for JSR Genetics so that they can service not the North American market but primarily South American and some European markets out of this high health area of the world here in Saskatchewan.
Then superimposed on that we’re looking at opportunities to do collaborative research.
The research that they’re very interested in right now has to do a lot with behavior in pigs.
Secondly we think there’s a lot of opportunities in the area of engineering.
We’re doing a lot of work in utility costs that they are very interested in because they operate in many different countries, most of them cold climate countries like Canada.
They think that’s something they can carry forward to their customer base and value add.
They have a director of research.
They do research primarily in reproduction but they sponsor research at third party locations as well.
They have some research they’re sponsoring in Canada.
We think this is going to be a really good fit to be able to continue to do some of the large head numbers or large number of pigs that are required on some studies that can be conducted out at that site as it was originally designed for.
Whittington notes the off-site facility has been turned into an isolation unit and the first plane load of pigs arrived on Tuesday.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
