As part of a pilot project Saskatchewan pork producers are being given the opportunity to confidentially monitor the movement of their swine transport vehicles in real time. Guelph based Farm Health Guardian and the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, in cooperation with a cross section of Saskatchewan swine farms and related pork sector businesses, are collaborating on a pilot project to assess the performance of various truck movement recording technologies.
Rob Hannam, the CEO of Farm Health Guardian, says, while some farms are close to an urban centre and are well connected through a GPS or cell signal, many are in more remote areas with poor reception.
Clip-Rob Hannam-Farm Health Guardian:
The purpose of this project is really just to see how our biosecurity software care be used to view the truck movements on and off the farm properties. It's able to automatically and confidentially record the movement of trucks or people on and off the farm properties and that's important to veterinarians when they're doing any kind of a disease investigation and they want to determine how much disease has arrived at the farm or where it might have travelled to and we're making that information available to the health professional like the vet in real time.
The participants in the project, if their trucks or their farm location are involved, they would be able to see all the data for their truck or for their farm but that's their information that they would be able to see and that would be confidential from the other participants in the project. However, we would likely be doing a roll up, sort of a summary report at the end of the project and make that available to Sask Pork but that won't be sharing the specifics.
That will be sharing the recommendations on how the technology works. I think that will be valuable for pork producers because they'll get a sense of, "here's the three or four different technologies and here's how they perform in real world conditions."
Source : Farmscape