Farmscape for November 1, 2011   (Episode 3996)

The Canadian Swine Health Board expects its National Biosecurity Training program to be launched in two more provinces early in the new year.

The National Biosecurity Training program is based on the National Farm Level Biosecurity Standard developed by the Canadian Swine Health Board and it was launched earlier this year in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba.

The program is being coordinated nationally through the Canadian Swine Health Board but delivered by the provincial pork organizations and is open to registered pork producers certified under the Canadian Quality Assurance Program.

Canadian Swine Health Board Biosecurity Advisory Committee chair Bill Ballantyne expects the training of the trainers to happen in Saskatchewan and Alberta in November and December and the program to be rolled out to producers early in the new year.

Clip-Bill Ballantyne-Canadian Swine Health Board:
It doesn't sound like it should be complicated but we try to be quite inclusive and have a number of meetings with the various groups that hopefully will be involved.

In other words the producer representatives or commodity organizations, the veterinarians in the particular province and also key groups are provincial government people as well.

In other words specialists either in the veterinary side or the marketing side of provincial governments.

They often have programs on-going already.

We don't want to duplicate things they've already got going.

We want to though encourage as much involvement in what we're trying to do as possible.

Ballantyne says, by delivering the training through the provincial pork offices, the package can be customized by region.

He says they're all using the same training material but areas of emphasis may differ from region to region so each province is encouraged to adapt the program to cover these differences but still adhere to that national scope.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

-The Biosecurity Training Program is expected to be among the key topics discussed as part of the third Canadian Swine Health Forum November 3rd and 4th in Niagara Falls.

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