The Western Canada PRRS-Free Herd Certification Pilot Project, an initiative of the Canadian Swine Health Board, is being administered by the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board and provides a protocol under which suppliers of pigs or semen are able to certify their stock is free of a specific disease, in this case Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome.

Sask Pork producer services manager Harvey Wagner explains protocol outlines testing procedures and types and numbers of tests needed.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

Originally it was meant to be for western Canadian farms.

Of those farms they had to be a CQA farm, they had to have a vet who was a member of the Canadian Association of Swine Veterinarians and they had to be PRRS free.

They can not have ELISA positive pigs in their herd.

If they had PRRS and they've recently eradicated PRRS but they still had some pigs that had antibodies to PRRS or had been vaccinated for PRRS they couldn't participate so they had to be completely free of PRRS.

We do have a number of farms like that across Canada, in western Canada for sure so we had kind of a guess at the number of farms that would be interested in participating and we hadn't filled the quota but we have had a lot of requests from other parts of Canada, particularly Ontario and Quebec to participate in the project as well.

So we discussed it with the Canadian Swine Health Board and they agreed that it would be valuable to the project to open it up so we are opening it up to Quebec and Ontario farms as well.

For more information on the Western Canada PRRS-Free Herd Certification Pilot Project, pork producers are encouraged to visit the PRRS-Free web site at prrsfree.com.

Further Reading

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Find out more information on PRRS by clicking here.