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.
Clip-Stewart Cressman-Swine Innovation Porc:
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.
Source : Farmscape