A Saskatchewan pilot project is testing new technologies designed to help pork producers improve their biosecurity and protect their herds from disease. Guelph based Farm Health Guardian and the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board are collaborating with over 20 Saskatchewan swine farms and related pork sector businesses to assess various truck movement recording technologies.
Rob Hannam, the CEO of Farm Health Guardian, explains some farms are close to an urban centre and are well connected through a GPS or cell signal but many, especially swine farms, are in more remote areas with poor reception so it's important to test new technology that they can use in those rural settings.
Clip-Rob Hannam-Farm Health Guardian:
The benefits really come back to biosecurity and there's two aspects to it. One is preventative and one is responsive or reactive. On the preventative side we see our customers using this kind of information to make sure they really know what's going on with their operations. Let's says they've got several farm locations and they're sending their trucks to those different locations.
Some of them would want to make sure, let's say, there's a truck wash in between, when it goes from farm A to farm B that they wash in between and, using the Farm Health Guardian system, they can determine that. They can double check to make sure, yes it went through the truck wash or not or did it follow the route that we had planned and they can see it went to farm A, B, C, truck wash, farm D.
So that preventative side, our customers can better monitor their truck fleets or their biosecurity practices in general. Then on the responsive side, if there is a suspect disease outbreak, then that gives the veterinarian all the information that he or she needs in real time to make choices and manage the disease and hopefully reduce any disease spread risk amongst their farm operations.
Source : Farmscape