The National Biosecurity Training programme is based on the National Farm Level Biosecurity Standard developed by the Canadian Swine Health Board and it was launched earlier this year in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba.

The programme is being coordinated nationally through the Canadian Swine Health Board but delivered by the provincial pork organizations and is open to registered pork producers certified under the Canadian Quality Assurance Programme.

Canadian Swine Health Board Biosecurity Advisory Committee chair Bill Ballantyne expects the training of the trainers to happen in Saskatchewan and Alberta in November and December and the programme to be rolled out to producers early in the new year.

Bill Ballantyne-Canadian Swine Health Board

It doesn't sound like it should be complicated but we try to be quite inclusive and have a number of meetings with the various groups that hopefully will be involved.

In other words the producer representatives or commodity organizations, the veterinarians in the particular province and also key groups are provincial government people as well.

In other words specialists either in the veterinary side or the marketing side of provincial governments.

They often have programmes on-going already.

We don't want to duplicate things they've already got going.

We want to though encourage as much involvement in what we're trying to do as possible.

Mr Ballantyne says, by delivering the training through the provincial pork offices, the package can be customized by region.

He says they're all using the same training material but areas of emphasis may differ from region to region so each province is encouraged to adapt the programme to cover these differences but still adhere to that national scope.