Agriculture committee  We're overseas in Japan, China, and Mexico, but with live production only in China.

Agriculture committee  First of all, for the hog industry, obviously economics will make a big difference in where you produce pigs and feed. Lots of land and processing plants will help you decide where you're going to build your barns. That's possibly counter to B.C.; maybe it's not as accessible the

Agriculture committee  My understanding about the vaccines is that they will not prevent the disease from coming into your herd; that's for sure. There will still be clinical signs. I believe that the mortality will be very close to the same. The only thing it will reduce is the amount of shedding. May

Agriculture committee  There's no real correlation between size and disease. It can hit any pig. It could be two pigs in a facility or 10,000 pigs in a facility. But the amount of shedding of the virus once that facility gets sick is obviously a lot more when there are a lot more animals. The virus bec

Agriculture committee  There's been science in the U.S. showing that the virus will carry over 10 miles in perfect conditions.

Agriculture committee  I'm not aware of that at the University of Guelph.

Agriculture committee  Correct. You got it right on.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  That's right. I think there are two components to it. There's the trusted trucker program, keeping the disease out of the province. That's important. However, it's not always absolute. If something does come in—and I'm talking about other diseases, too—then we can control it. Wit

Agriculture committee  That's right. It's a strain on equipment. We have just the amount of equipment to do all the work. Once you have positive sites, you want to dedicate that equipment to those positive sites only, so they're not being used as efficiently as we could. Bringing it to negative sites w

Agriculture committee  Definitely, if they're not cleaned properly, trailers are probably the number one way to transfer disease. Live pigs are going into trailers, and if there were infected pigs in the trailer before that, the chances of them getting infected if it's not washed perfectly is very high

Agriculture committee  When we sell pigs to the U.S., we use third party trucking. Internally, when we move our pigs within Manitoba and Saskatchewan, we use our own trucks, so our truck and wash base is centrally located for that transfer.

Agriculture committee  Yes, but that's not trucks coming back from the U.S.

Agriculture committee  Okay, I'll just wrap up. The second thing is to continue to support the CVO office. They have been very helpful. They are running out of resources and testing, and we need continued support of them.

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you for giving us the time to present today. My name is Claude Vielfaure. I am president of HyLife. HyLife was founded in 1994 as a joint venture of two families and has quickly grown to become Canada's leading pork producer, producing 1.9