Farmscape for November 16, 2018

The Prairie Swine Centre has launched a review of its strategic plan.
To make sure the Prairie Swine Centre remains connected to the needs of the swine industry in Canada, it's reviewing its strategic plan.
Dr. Murray Pettitt, the CEO of the Prairie Swine Centre, told those on hand yesterday for Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2018 the swine industry and its needs have changed.

Clip-Dr. Murray Pettitt-Prairie Swine Centre:
We always operate with a strategic plan and every several years we create a new one and we're just at the end of our current one this year.
The goals here are to go out, consult with industry, listen to them, tells us what their problems are, what their issues are, what challenges they face, what knowledge gaps they face, what they would benefit from the most and what would they value in terms of information.
Then we'll see if the swine centre could step into any of those knowledge gaps and provide additional value.
We're certainly going to be staying with our traditional pillars of research because those have proven to be very critical, crucial to the industry.
I think we've had enough feedback from industry over 25 years that we know they value what we do and we're going to continue doing that but we're going to see if there are other areas we can get into.
I don't know what the answers to those questions will be yet.
Since the industry has changed so much in the past 25 years we're now going to take a quick pause and say what are the problems of today and what do we see as the problems of the next five and 10 years?
Industry is adjusting in all sorts of way to cope with the new realities of life and it's quite likely the swine centre is going to have to do a little bit of that too.
As I said, we'll continue to do what we do best but maybe there's going to be a little but of tweaking or a little adjustment and maybe there is a new area we could potentially step into.
What that may be and how that would look, it's too early to now.

Dr. Pettitt says the Prairie Swine Centre is just starting to interact with industry in asking the questions so it will take several months.
He anticipates wrapping up the process sometime this coming spring.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork