A Survey of Best Management Practices of Swine Farms Across Canada
Two projects funded by Swine Innovation Porc and carried out by Prairie Swine Centre (PSC) and Centre de développement du porc du Québec (CDPQ) examined the adoption of best management practices on farms throughout Canada. The first project audited 24 farms across Canada (2018), with...
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Ken Engele
Enrich your pigs, enrich your profits
Enriching a sow’s environment is easy, inexpensive and offers a range of benefits. This was made clear by the project “From Innovation to Adoption: On-farm demonstration of Swine Research”, which was led by Ken Engele at Prairie Swine Centre and Geneviève Berthiaume at CDPQ. One...
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Ken Engele
Examining the effectiveness of providing functional amino acids to enhance pig robustness
Pigs are continuously exposed to microbial pathogens and immune- stimulatory antigens that have a negative impact on productivity. Pigs exposed to immune challenge, without exhibiting any clinical signs of disease, show reduced appetite and growth and less efficient use of nutrients compared to healthy pigs....
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Miranda Smit
Effects of long distance transport in the health and welfare of early weaned pigs
The Canadian swine industry relies heavily on the transport of weaned pigs. Recently, the maximum acceptable transport time for pigs in Canada has been decreased from 36 to 28 hours. Weaning is a stressful period for pigs and pigs are often transported at the same...
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Miranda Smit
Identification of risk factors for sow mortality in Canadian herds
Recent years have seen a trend towards increasing sow mortality figures around the world. In order to understand the underlying causes influencing sow mortality and culling on Canadian farms a project is under way to answer these questions using an integrated approach. Specifically by: 1)...
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Miranda Smit
Effects of long distance transport on the health and welfare of early weaned pigs
During transport, piglets can experience numerous stressors, including feed and water deprivation, handling at loading and unloading, extreme temperatures, vibrations and noise. However, it is not known whether the combined impacts of weaning and transport overlap, are additive, or synergistic. The effects of long duration...
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Miranda Smit
2022 Prairie Swine Centre Les resultats
Le programme de recherche du Prairie Swine Centre vise à améliorer l'efficacité (économique, environnementale et de bien-être) des producteurs de porc du Canada. Les conclusions de la recherche 2022 du Centre sont maintenant disponibles. 2022 Prairie Swine Centre Les resultats - Results ...
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Ken Engele
Best Practices: How Do You Measure Up?
An audit was completed on Canadian pork barns in 2017, with areas for improvement including farrowing systems, nursery facilities, finishing facilities and managing water intake. The optimal farrowing room environment is often achieved, with many of the barns using heat lamps, pads or both, as...
Some Audits are a Good Thing…Really!
An audit was completed in 2017 on best management practices in Canadian swine barns. Results show areas for possible improvements in biosecurity, personal protection and training, washing procedures and gestation housing systems. Many of the participating farms had biosecurity protocols like showering in and out...
Truck Wash Project Aims to End Bioinsecurity
Trailers can be hard to properly clean and are a huge biosecurity risk to the swine industry. Conditions where pathogens could be inactivated were investigated so that this information could be applied to the cleaning process of the trailers. Most pathogens can be eliminated by...