Thank you.
That's a very good question and a very complex issue. Again, we'll go to innovation here.
I can only speak about my personal experiences in Atlantic Canada, but we are in exactly the position you just described. We're a geographically isolated area which affords us biosecurity and disease-free status. It makes us an excellent area for housing farrowing facilities. However, it does limit our access to resources such as veterinary services, along with many others.
What we've had to do as producers is become more self-reliant and more resilient. We've had to take more of an in-house approach to animal health and animal health programs. We do have regional veterinary services in Atlantic Canada. However, we do not have access to a swine specialist vet in our province. We use one out of Nova Scotia. It limits the availability of that person on our site to approximately two times a year. What we have done, though, is we've adapted and we use today's technology. We do video conferencing with our vet. We literally will send pictures back and forth. We'll send samples to the lab. The results will go to the vet. We'll do phone conferencing. It is a challenge in being geographically isolated, but it's one that we accept and adapt to in order to maintain the biosecurity and the enhancement.
There's an inherent advantage to that, in a way that's sort of an offset. It is that every time someone accesses my facility, whether it's an industry expert or a veterinarian or a sales professional, there's an inherent risk to my biosecurity and protocols have to be followed.
By becoming more resilient, using technology—the Internet, teleconferencing, video conferencing—to try to follow some of those programs, we can maintain the advantage of biosecurity and isolation and overcome the lack of resources available on a farm.