In May 2010 at the University of Manitoba's National Centre for Livestock and the Environment, federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz announced funding for research initiatives aimed at boosting the competitive edge of the Canadian pork industry, including $9.5 million to create a Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster, now know as Swine Innovation Porc.

Claude Miville, the chair of Swine Innovation Porc, says even though the work is not yet completed stakeholders have been pleased with the results up to now.

Claude Miville-Swine Innovation Porc

We put the focus on quality of product, differentiation of product and cost of production.

These points are very important to have more value-added on our pork products so we invited the scientific community and we got many proposals and we are very proud of this, actually we have more than 100 researchers all around in Canada working on 14 different projects and with the majority of those research projects we have researchers from more than one university.

It's a success based on the collaboration, on the cooperation between the researchers to try to find solutions for the producers and to develop new products.

We have two main fields.

One is on the productivity, cost of production with research on feed for example and other areas on quality or differentiation of products.

We also have research projects on animal welfare, all those issues that are important for the producers in Canada and also for our partners in the Pork Value Chain Roundtable.

Mr Miville suggests the initiative has shown collaborative research involving industry and university and government researchers creates a win-win situation for all players within the Canadian pork value chain.