The Saskatchewan Swine On-Farm Biosecurity Program is a companion program to the Canadian Swine Health Board's National On-Farm Biosecurity Training Program and is being offered by the Saskatchewan government through Growing Forward.

Sask Pork producer services manager Harvey Wagner explains the program provides funding to Saskatchewan pork producers who have participated in the national program for a second veterinary visit and for the purchase of equipment to enhance their farm's biosecurity.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:

The criteria is that the farm has to have participated in the national programme.

They have to have completed their biosecurity training and have had a producer self assessment and a veterinary assessment as well.

Once they've done that they can get equipment enhancements in a number of different areas like in quarantine, cleaning and disinfection, animal transport, so load-outs, actual being able to handle and clean their trucks better, disinfection equipment, metering, maybe some filtration, deadstock management, controlled access so that you can have better control of people and materials coming into your barn, warning communications systems, rodent control, pest control, water treatment and also medical storage equipment.

It's pretty broad but the important thing is that it's something that farm and the veterinarian work together on to decided what's the best bang for the buck or what's the best thing that that particular farm can do to enhance their biosecurity.

Sometimes small things will make a fairly significant boost to biosecurity so it helps focus people on what they can do to improve the biosecurity on their farm.

Wagner says applications are now coming in and the first payouts have been made. For more information on the program call Sask Pork at 306 244 7752.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.