Farmscape for December 19, 2016

The Operations Manager of the University of Manitoba's Glenlea Research Station says discoveries made through research have been driving force behind the success of agriculture in feeding growing numbers of people while using fewer inputs.
"Livestock Research: The Benefits and the Costs of Achieving Them" was among the topics discussed last week as part of Prairie Livestock Expo 2016 in Winnipeg.
Dr. Tracy Gilson, the Operations Manager of the University of Manitoba's Glenlea Research Station, says the primary goal of agricultural research is to help farmers improve their efficiency and productivity.

Clip-Dr. Tracy Gilson-University of Manitoba:
Agriculture would not exist without the discoveries.
Some of the discoveries happened on farm but a majority of those discoveries happened on research facilities just like the one we have here in Manitoba and they're situated across Canada.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada first started with their research facilities.
Under a controlled environment they were able to find techniques, technologies that would help the producers, once adopted, improve their bottom line.
If you're talking about livestock research specifically, we're talking about the productivity of the animal that we have so it's more output with fewer inputs and, in order to determine that, we need to have research behind how we feed our animals, how we house our animals.
Another is the feed efficiency, the utilization of by-products.
When we do research for our livestock industry we're really thinking about making them more resilient to everything from market trends to changes in how livestock are raised and this helps them with their bottom line.

Dr. Gilson says we're looking to produce more food and finding ways to be more productive in doing that is a certainly topic of conversation now.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork