As a result of this year's early spring, the Canadian seasonal ban on spreading livestock manure ended 10 days earlier than normal, on 1 April.

Doug Redekop, the president of La Broquerie-based Precision Pumping, said that despite the early spring melt and relatively dry weather conditions, the biggest challenges faced by manure applicators so far has been ice in the lagoons and getting equipment stuck in the fields but the risk of spreading PED remains top of the mind.

Doug Redekop-Precision Pumping:

There is one crew that has isolated their equipment and was anticipating pumping just PED sites and then one of the other PED positive sites, they have their own equipment and so I think the key here is that not everyone is going to be actively out there looking to pump these sites.

They're wanting to isolate them to specific equipment allocations and so we can minimise the risk of spreading it that way.

We can be happy in the fact that it's been drier.

PED and the spread of PED is a lot like TGE [Transmissible Gastro Enteritis] and so if you've got wet moist conditions and you have the ability to track the virus with either mud or manure or so on and so forth, wet damp conditions would certainly be your enemy so the dry conditions have certainly been a positive.

To my recollection none of the PED sites that have been identified in Manitoba have been spread since last fall so we're going to have to be dealing with some of these challenges as the days go ahead.

Mr Redekop said, with every PED case that has been identified, the pork industry has worked tirelessly to identify the source of the disease.

As far as he knows there have been no incidents where manure applicators have been identified as the source of spread.