Prairie Diagnostic Services Responds to Reports of Porcine Sapovirus in Canada

Sep 11, 2023

Prairie Diagnostic Services is now screening for Porcine Sapovirus when testing samples collected from baby pigs experiencing diarrhea.
In response to the first reports in Canada in January of Porcine Sapovirus, Prairie Diagnostic Services in Saskatoon has been working with the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Iowa State University to make a diagnostic test available in Canada. PDS CEO Dr. Yanyun Huang says the virus has been known in North America for decades but it was first implicated as causing diarrhea in pigs in the U.S. in 2019.

Quote-Dr. Yanyun Huang-Prairie Diagnostic Services:
Because we had a couple of swine practitioners reporting that they are dealing with clinical cases, I recruited clinical samples from these veterinarians so we were able to use these samples to verify that the PCR assay actually works here. We fast-tracked the offering of this test after we knew the test actually works on the clinical samples we recruited. We offered this test as a research test so we are not waiting to accumulate certain numbers of detections when we can call this test fully validated

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Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

I am going to show you how we save our farm money by making our own pig feed. It's the same process as making our cattle feed just with a slight adjustment to our grinder/ mixer that makes all the difference. We buy all the feed stuff required to make the total mix feed. Run each through the mixer and at the end of the process we have a product that can be consumed by our pigs.

I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.