By Bruce Cochrane
Research conducted by the Prairie Swine Centre indicates the designers of swine transport equipment have a long way to go when it comes to improving the cleanability of swine transport trailers.
As part of research being conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc aimed at automating the cleaning and disinfection of swine transport equipment to improve transport biosecurity the Prairie Swine Centre has evaluated the cleanability of swine transport trailers.
Dr. Jennifer Brown, a Research Scientist Ethology with the Prairie Swine Centre, says livestock transport companies across Canada were surveyed to determine what makes and models of trailers they are using and the designs of those trailers were evaluated.
Dr. Jennifer Brown-Prairie Swine Centre:
We were kind of hoping that there would be some main trailer designs that are being used but the truth is that, as people are purchasing trailers, they can request a large number of options for those trailer designs so we did find that there was a very wide variety in overall trailer designs.
Some of that is very small differences in details but still there are a lot of differences.
If you wanted to really evaluate them on their cleanability, there are certainly some differences in terns of shields around lighting, the way gates are attached and the design of gates.
Looking at those pot-belly trailers, those certainly are the most common design but they're also one of the most difficult to clean, especially the dual purpose trailers where there's removable decking so we've got a long ways to go in terms of improving cleanability of our trailers.
Dr. Brown acknowledges trailer designs are not going to be changed over night so, in the interim, it's important to know what procedures are needed to get a trailer properly cleaned.
Source: Farmscape