The Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, in partnership with the Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan through Growing Forward 2, is offering up to 4,000 dollars through the Saskatchewan Swine Welfare Programme to assist in the purchase of needle free injection equipment or euthanasia equipment.

Harvey Wagner, the Manager of Producer Services with Sask Pork, says there's been a lot of interest and applications have been coming in steadily.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

Any farm who is a CQA registered farm is eligible so that means that basically all of our commercial farms in Saskatchewan qualify.

It doesn't matter what you buy.

It can be something for something for a few hundred dollars or it can be something for up to 4,000 dollars.

If it's over 4,000 dollars the farm would have to pick up the excess over that and there has been a couple of cases of that where they purchased some more major equipment and they ran over a bit, but that's fine too but it does help quite a bit.

We're seeing a variation.

Some of the larger operations are using needle-free equipment.

It seems that the smaller farms, like the under 400 sow, are more interested in the euthanasia equipment but some of the large sow herds are interested in the needle-free injection technology.

That's kind of been the variation and the break-down so far but we'd certainly like to see all the farms use what ever is appropriate for their farm.

Mr Wagner says the programme is scheduled to run to the end of February 2018, so all of the applications have to be in by about that time.

He notes it coincides with the Growing Forward-2 timeline so the programme needs to be completely wrapped up before the end of the government fiscal year of 2018.

For more information contact the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board.