Farmscape for October 20, 2022
| Full Interview 7:23 | Listen  |
The CEO of Farm Heath Guardian is encouraging pork producers to consider tracking their farm’s performance in the area of biosecurity as one way to improve that aspect of their operation. “Biosecurity: What’s New in Protecting Your Farm?” will be among the topics discussed as part of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2022 set for November 15 and 16 in Saskatoon. Rob Hannam, the CEO of Farm Heath Guardian, suggests, while we all know how important biosecurity is, it’s easy to lose sight of that and it’s hard to maintain those efforts day to day every day.
Clip-Rob Hannam-Farm Heath Guardian:
If I’m speaking with a producer and we’re talking about biosecurity the first thing that would come to mind would be cleaning and disinfection and that’s right. Those are the things we should be considering but we manage what we measure and if we start to manage biosecurity then we’ll start to do a better job at that. I’ll make a comparison. I think producers today do a fantastic job of managing feed intake, of knowing what the return is. Feed is a big cost and the production metrics; we know gain per day and those types of things are well managed and well understood. But when it comes down to some of the other aspects of production, whether it’s animal health and recording any disease issues or the impact and cost of disease or whether it’s biosecurity, how well are we doing and following our biosecurity plans, those things tend not to be measured. That’s just a comparison. There are some things where we manage it because we’re measuring it and keeping track weekly or daily or monthly and there’s other things where we feel we do a good job but the next level is to start measuring some of those things so we truly know we are doing a good job consistently
Hannam says when it comes to biosecurity, we’re all in this together and we’re only as strong as the weakest link in our pork supply chain so it’s all about working together to protect the entire sector.
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*Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers
