A national survey, being conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Pork, will provide information that will assist pork producers in improving the efficiency of their operations while reducing their environmental footprint. Scientists with the University of Manitoba are coordinating the "Canadian Pig Production Practices Survey for Improved Economic and Environmental Viability," an online survey designed to help quantify improvements in production efficiency over the years and to provide a clearer picture of the pork sector's environmental footprint.
Dr. Mario Tenuta a Professor of Applied Soil Ecology at the University of Manitoba and the NSERC Fertilizer Canada Western Grains Research Foundation Industrial Research Chair in 4-R Nutrient Stewardship, says the survey will be available for the next one to two months.
Clip-Dr. Mario Tenuta-University of Manitoba:
The types of questions span an operation. We really ask the respondent to focus on a main barn and we suggest the one that is really important to the whole operation and, if you have several barns that are important and equivalent that's fine, just select one of them.
This quite an encompassing survey, something that really hasn't been done in Canada before and so we really are going to be able to use the information to, in effect, reconstruct typical operations in different regions for Canada and then be able to go through some scenarios where we can tweak the practices of pig production and see what the effect is on the efficiency of production, the flowthrough of the animals, resource use, water use, electricity use and so forth.
Source : Farmscape