Last November, Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives introduced a programme under which pork producers enrolled in the Canadian Quality Assurance Program are eligible for rebates of up to C$2,000 for the purchase of a needle-free injector.

Manitoba Pork Council quality assurance and labour programmes manager, Miles Beaudin, says, of the approximately 620 farms on the CQA programme in Manitoba, about 150 have purchased or are in the process of purchasing a gun.

Miles Beaudin – Manitoba Pork Council

By not having a needle penetrate the skin of an animal you do bring at least three big areas of improvement.

Needle-less injectors don't have needles so there's no needles to break in the animal.

Broken needles is a physical hazard and we try to do our best not to have broken needles in pork obviously.

Another big advantage of using needle-less technology is that there is a significant reduction of disease transmission between injections.

Typically with a needle, we recommend that you change the needle every 10 to 20 injections.

With a needle-less injector, there are no needles and you reduce disease transfer by 75 per cent and that's not cleaning the orifice at the end.

We believe that if you clean the orifice at the end, you could almost have maybe 100 per cent reduction in disease transfer from one injection to the other.

The third area where there's a major improvement is there's a better uptake in medication from the animal so then the animal itself can respond better to the medication, equal or better than using a needle and syringe.

Mr Beaudin expects money to be available under the programme for the next two years and he hopes to see more farmers adopting the use of needle-free technology.