The Western Canada PRRS-Free Herd Certification Pilot Project, a Canadian Swine Health Board, initiative administered by the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, provides a protocol under which pig or semen suppliers can certify their stock is free of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome.

Sask Pork Producer Services Manager Harvey Wagner says, with the enrolment deadline only days away, the project has attracted interest from across Canada.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

Most of the initial interest was from the breeding stock producers.

They saw this as being very useful to their business.

They do a fairly significant level of testing all the time so they saw that it would be another means for them to prove their due diligence.

We've had a surprising number of feeder pig producers.

They were very interested in it too.

They can see that there's some down-stream dollars attached to this when they can tell their buyers we're free and we test on a regular basis and here's the proof.

Then there's also the farms involved in the area regional control.

They were something that we didn't actually anticipate but they're doing the work and they're interested in doing it and there's really not a lot of help or level of tracking for those area regional control so the protocol that was developed buy our expert group helped develop a structure around the whole testing of PRRS and how to do it and so it's a standardized process.

Mr Wagner notes, because the project is due to wrap up at the end of 2012 and officials want to get in a full year of testing, enrollment is scheduled to wrap up 10 December.

He says farms have registered in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and farms in Quebec are expected to come on board so, by the end of the week, there will probably be 80 to 85 farms on the project.

For more information, visit PRRSfree.com.

Further Reading

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Find out more information on PRRS by clicking here.