Canadian pork production has made a tremendous transition from smaller family farms into large-scale high-production barns. \u00a0This transition has spurred several process changes and technological advancements throughout the Pork Value Chain. \u00a0So let\u2019s say you are presented with a new technology, tool, or method to help production. How do you decide if it is going to have a net benefit to your business?<\/p>\n
There are a lot of things to consider: implementation and maintenance costs, productivity impacts, worker and manager preferences, food safety and animal handling regulations.\u00a0 Worker health and safety is another consideration that can impact the bottom line. \u00a0For example, if a new tool increases risk factors for injury, injury and work loss may require overtime or recruiting and training replacement workers to make up for absenteeism. Although technological innovations may have an impact on worker health and safety, these impacts (whether positive or negative) can be difficult to quantify and integrate with business decisions.<\/p>\n
To address this, the Prairie Swine Centre is collaborating with the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan to evaluate the health and safety effects of new technologies.\u00a0 This will help producers decide if they want to adopt a new technology. The goal of this project is to develop a suite of performance measures (a \u2018toolkit\u2019) which can be applied to decision-making about to new technologies.\u00a0\u00a0 The specific technology we are investigating in this study is needle-less injectors, and we are comparing them with conventional needle injectors in a comprehensive evaluation that attempts to incorporate all the decision-making factors.<\/p>\n
This last summer we conducted ergonomic evaluations at the Prairie Swine Centre during nursery pig injections and piglet processing.\u00a0 More than 650 injections were assessed using electromyography (EMG) to measure muscle activation and forces in the hand and wrist, as well as a posture sensor glove which records finger, hand, and wrist position during injection tasks. Processing is currently underway to determine muscle force and hand\/wrist posture for each injection method.\u00a0 The study is still ongoing. This year we will conduct interviews on worker preferences, compare injury rates before and after the adoption of the needle-less injector, and evaluate the cost of each method. Canadian pork production has made a tremendous transition from smaller family farms into large-scale high-production barns. \u00a0This transition has spurred several process changes and technological advancements throughout the Pork Value Chain. \u00a0So let\u2019s say you are presented with a new technology, tool, or method to help production. How do you decide if it is going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,931],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pork-insight-articles","category-prairie-swine-centre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18895,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18894\/revisions\/18895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFor more information on this and other ergonomics studies, check out the Ergonomics Lab website of the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture : <\/strong>http:\/\/research-groups.usask.ca\/ergolab\/index.php<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"