With investment starting to happen and company’s building new finisher barns and feed mills in Manitoba, demand from Asian countries expanding the hog industry in Manitoba is set to take off.

George Matheson, the chair of Manitoba Pork said restoring hog production to levels needed to supply the province’s pork processing plants will be among the sector’s priorities in 2018.

In 2017, the industry saw both challenges and positive changes within Manitoba’s pork sector.

Matheson said among the key developments are the diseases faced by the province’s pork producers, changes in government regulations that will allow the construction of new production facilities and the introduction of new programs to help producers interested in barn renovation or construction. Manitoba saw an outbreak of PED ending the year with 80 cases making great progress containing this disease and also eradicating it.

Also, the passage of Bill 24 by the provincial government was crucial and the Manitoba Pork Council creating a Swine Development Corporation to assist producers who are interested in building barns.

“There are good interest and contacts with the Manitoba Pork Council office regarding what the requirements might be,” he said. “I believe there will be up to four new barns that are in the planning stages right now to be built in 2018 so, at the very minimum, we should see those hogs coming on stream by early 2019 or even in late 2018.”

Matheson said the province’s pork sector is working with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to create a trusted trucker program under which swine transport vehicles returning from the United States would be washed, disinfected and dried at certified truck wash facilities in Canada.

“We’re working with the CFIA to develop this Trusted Transport Program to get our trailers cleaned and baked at a very state of the art and exceptional facility at Blumenort, Manitoba which would assist us greatly to keeping disease out of this province,” Matheson said. “CFIA and Manitoba Pork Council held many meetings the last six months regarding this and are agreeing with what needs doing. We want to keep it as simple and as straightforward as possible but also close off any loopholes where we think disease could slip through.

Matheson said although current regulations require swine transport vehicles cleaned before returning to Canada, studies of the wash stations used in the U.S. suggest they are inadequate and possibly a vector for transporting disease.

“Producers are in favor of biosecurity and feel the wash stations in Manitoba are superior to anything else the industry is using anywhere,” he said.

A system that uses high-pressure water and a vacuum followed by dry heat are proving useful for cleaning and disinfecting swine transport vehicles.

Scientists working on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc are developing a system for cleaning and disinfecting swine transport vehicles to reduce the potential for transferring disease from one load of animals to the next.

Dr. Terry Fonstad, with the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, said the concept involves a hydrovac system which uses a hot water wash followed by baking.

“It’s a vacuum system that we use in the excavation industry where you use high-pressure water to make a hole, and then you vacuum up the dirt and the water,” said Dr. Fonstad. “The vacuum has significant air flow, in the four thousand CFM range with 300 horsepower motors, so it’s not insignificant amounts of suction. We take a dirty truck just finished hauling animals, start at the back vacuuming up all of the shavings, leftover manure, and things in the truck up to the front.

Then switch heads, using water pressure and vacuum at the same time, much like cleaning carpet, with high-pressure water. Cleaning and suction that material away immediately working your way back from the front of the truck to the back upon exiting you would have a clean truck.”

He said the trick becomes, from an engineering standpoint, how to heat 53-foot livestock trailers to elevated temperatures for extended periods of time economically and ensure that every piece of the trailer gets to that temperature to inactivate any bacteria or virus that are on the trailer.

Dr. Fonstad said the concept is effective and the next step is a three-year program to get to the point where a person standing outside the trailer can operate the system remotely. •

— By Harry Siemens