Manitoba’s On-Farm Food Safety Program now includes an initiative to help livestock producers and related businesses buy needle-less injectors to administer vaccines and medications.
The program, funded through the Growing Forward agriculture policy framework, will provide up to $2,000 toward the purchase of a needle-less injector by a Manitoba farm, farm supplier, assembly yard or livestock hauler.
Needle-less injectors allow a user such as a veterinarian or producer to deliver vaccine or medication without puncturing the skin as a traditional needle would, swine business development specialist Robyn Harte said.
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While that helps reduce abscesses and tears in the skin, it also “allows producers to move a lot more easily in the pens to vaccinate the animals, and it also allows them to get into perhaps more awkward positions that a regular needle wouldn’t allow,” Harte said last week on the program Farmscape, co-sponsored by the Manitoba Pork Council.
The up-front cost of a needle-less injector can range from $2,000 to $5,000, but the province’s assistance will accelerate the payback period, said Miles Beaudin, quality assurance and labour programs manager with the pork council.
Beaudin noted a needle-less injector also helps eliminate any food safety risk that could be caused by a broken needle left in an animal.
Sometimes, he said on Farmscape, “producers lose the pig or they don’t notify the packer there’s a broken needle, and sometimes the pigs end up at the processor.”
From pigs’ perspective, he added, the animals don’t necessarily associate any pain with a needless injector.
“They don’t even flinch, it looks like, so it’s a lot better system for the pig,” he said.
