Farmscape for April 8, 2014

The chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board credits the vigilance of the province's pork industry for keeping Saskatchewan free of PED.
Although Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea has spread throughout the U.S. over the past year, in Canada the infection has been contained to several cases in Ontario with isolated cases in Manitoba, Quebec and PEI.
Sask Pork Chair Florian Possberg says Saskatchewan's pork producers have been very responsive in stepping up biosecurity and feeding programs to accommodate the reduction of risk.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
I think we're very watchful for signs of PED in our area, in our region.
We do have monitoring programs that check for signs of PED, scours and that sort of thing.
We are also doing quite a bit of testing of places like assembly yards, slaughter plants, trucks and trailers that come back from areas where there is infection so that we would have a heads up if the sanitation isn't proper and creating risks in our zone, in our province.
We are doing quite a number of things like that to, not only identify the disease in the early stages but to identify the virus around us and try and stop that disease from even being near us.

Possberg says, because it's such a serious disease, producers are petrified of the prospects of having it come onto their farms.
He says they've taken a lot of interest in knowing what to look for, knowing the things that will reduce risk and carefully going through security protocols to make sure they are doing everything they can to prevent the disease from coming onto their units.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council