Farmscape for August 29, 2013

The industry services coordinator with Manitoba Pork Council reports close to 100 percent of Manitoba's pork producers have completed a detailed multi purpose survey.
To gather detailed information on the province's pork industry Manitoba Pork Council has completed a survey of its members.
Industry services coordinator Arnie Thorlacius reports, based on Canadian Quality Assurance records, nearly 100 percent of validated sites have participated.

Clip-Arnie Thorlacius-Manitoba Pork Council:
We'd sent the survey out for a number of reasons.
One was to help Manitoba establish our producer premise ID program.
We were collecting the information for MAFRI so that they could assign PPID numbers to premises that had livestock on site and we were covering the hog portion of it.
We were also trying to collect information for our own use for when we are trying to come up with programs to assist producers as well as for when we're lobbying government on their behalf.
The first thing that we were collecting was contact information as well as location data, legal land descriptions, mailing addresses, phone numbers, things of that nature.
We were also collecting information regarding things like manure storage, feed storage on site, whether or not feed mills were present.
We collected information regarding things like heating systems for barns.
Actually we had to use that information when we were trying to lobby the government regarding things like the upcoming coal ban.
We also collected some information regarding whether or not producers were still in the industry because some of the people that we actually mailed this out to, we weren't sure if they were still in the industry.
We try to keep our records as up to date as we can but in the last few years with the volatility in the industry we know that we've been losing producers and we were just trying to make sure that we had an accurate record of who was still in hogs.

Thorlacius notes, with the exception of questions pertaining to premise registration, the majority of the data collected through the survey is being used only by employees of Manitoba Pork Council and only aggregate data is being released.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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