Farmscape for April 11, 2006  (Episode 2111)

The University of Manitoba expects its new multi-million dollar National Centre for Livestock and the Environment to be fully operational by this summer.

The National Centre for Livestock and the Environment is a 12 hundred acre multi-disciplinary research facility being constructed at the University of Manitoba's Glenlea Research Farm approximately 15 miles south of Winnipeg.

Dr. Karin Wittenberg, the head of the University's Department of Animal Science says the facility is being built on a clay soil land base and has the buildings, the equipment and the land base and the research staff to conduct whole systems research focused on intensive animal agriculture.

Clip-Dr. Karin Wittenberg-University of Manitoba

The facilities include animal housing, manure storage, field application equipment for manure, field plots fully instrumented to do both water quality and air monitoring, weather monitoring, a feed processing facility, a feedlot and then a fairly wide range of laboratories for odor and microbial and nutrient research.

Our goals are to understand the biological, the microbiological, the chemical, the physical processes that happen in a farm ecosystem and by doing that we can start to marry management practices that allow efficient use of nutrients, cycling of nutrients and marry that with what is good environmental practice and marry that with what is healthy soil microbe profile and marry that with what is limited pathogen movement.

Dr. Wittenberg  says the goal is to have all of the infrastructure in place by this coming June.

She says 2006 will be used to set up field plots to collect base line data but basically, by this summer, she expects the centre to fully operational.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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