Page 2 - Australian Pork Newspaper

Pig Industry Calendar of Events
2019
DEC 10 - 11 – The Pork Show, Quebec City, Canada www.leporcshow.com
2020
JAN 7-9 – Banff Pork Seminar, Banff, Canada www.banffpork.ca
JAN 15 -16 – NutriFair, Fredericia, Denmark www.ilikevents.com/ event/10200-nutrifair
JAN 15 -16 – 51st Annual South Dakota Pork Congress www.sdppc. org/events-4/pork-congress
FEB 12-13 – Missouri Pork Expo, Missouri, US www.mopork.com/events/ missouri-pork-expo-2
MAR 31- APR 1 – London Swine Conference, Ontario, Canada www. londonswineconference.ca
JUN 9-11 – Agritech West Africa 2020, Accra, Ghana www. agritechwestafrica.com
How to supply event details: Send all details to Australian Pork Newspaper, PO Box 387, Cleveland, Qld 4163, call 07 3286 1833 fax: 07 3821 2637, email: ben@porknews.com.au
porknews.com.au
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Showcasing our new and upcoming industry leaders
ONCE again, Austral- ian Pork Limited’s R&I team took advantage of our industry and re- search community com- ing together for the 17th Australasian Pig Science Association conference held in Adelaide from November 17-20 to host a postgraduate student workshop on Sunday, November 17.
This workshop was at- tended by 32 people, in- cluding Honours and PhD students from around Australia who are work- ing on pig-related projects and Australasian Pork Re- search Institute Limited Industry Placement Pro- gram recipients.
The afternoon session was dedicated to provid- ing each participant an opportunity to use their presentation skills to provide a three-minute, plain English synopsis of their research project and explain the purpose, ex- pected outcomes and key industry benefits from their work.
It was a terrific day, and it was incredibly clear we have a very talented group of postgraduate students who, through their stud- ies, are each contributing to extend our scientific knowledge of key chal- lenges facing our industry that can then be used to support practical recom- mendations to producers.
Congratulations to all participants for the high- quality presentations made on the day and for your enthusiastic involve- ment.
In particular, my con- gratulations go to So- phie Ward (University of Adelaide) and Nina Matsumoto (Murdoch University) who received the highest scores from the judges and Dr Jessica Craig (Rivalea Australia) for receiving the People’s Choice Award for best presentation.
I’d also like to highlight that 17 students made oral presentations of their work at the APSA Con- ference itself (with others presenting their outcomes in the poster sessions) – and capably demonstrated to the 300 or so confer- ence delegates how to do this well!
Leading off the student presentation session was Shandala Loving, a PhD student from Charles Dar- win University, Northern Territory.
Shandala’s studies are aiming to assess the spa- tiotemporal distribution of feral pigs in northern Australian wetlands for improved management.
With the ongoing threat of African swine fever, obtaining a broader un- derstanding of the work being done in feral pig management is of high in- terest to us all.
Shandala opened her presentation by likening risks associated with feral pig culling to the reported increased spread of tuber- culosis in cattle as a result of increased badger move- ment due to the badger culling program in the UK (that has been in place since 2011).
Shandala provided esti- mates that feral pigs are present on over 45 percent of Australia’s landmass, with a population of about 23 million.
In her studies, Shandala is using adapted tracking devices, fitting these to
collars worn by individual feral pigs and using the tracking devices to deter- mine the impact of aerial culling as a management technique for feral pigs.
Notably, her first experi- ment aimed to understand whether aerial culling in- creases the movement of feral pigs and therefore disease movement.
Shandala has shown that prior to a cull, feral pigs were not moving more than 3km per day.
Post-cull, the collared animals disappeared (a tracking signal could not be detected) for several weeks (the shooters pur- posely did not kill any collared pigs).
After this time, some in- dividuals were found to have traversed greater dis- tances per day than pre- cull (with one shown to have traversed 14km in a day), reflecting that new territories open up as pigs are removed.
Shandala considered the current management prac- tices used for feral pigs in the Northern Territory are likely increasing their dispersal and that impacts need to be managed at a population scale.
Her second experiment is exploring whether feral pigs that are geographi- cally close are also geneti- cally close.
To explore this, Shanda- la has collected 240 sam- ples (with support from hunters) from across the Northern Territory.
Shandala has identified that, of the pigs sampled, there are a number of dis- tinct pig metapopulations and some populations are closely related (such as between a population located on an island and those on the mainland), indicating significant movements of pigs be-
tween populations. Shandala considered
that uninformed manage- ment interventions used for feral pigs could there- fore have negative impacts on disease transmission, with more information needed from other states and other feral pig popu- lations.
We are very fortunate, and pleased, that Shandala was able to accept our invitation to present her research on feral pigs at our postgraduate student workshop and then attend APSA to increase her pork industry knowledge.
Dr Kate Plush from Sun- Pork Solutions gave an ex- cellent and engaging pres- entation to the students on her career to date, scien- tific writing, preparation of scientific manuscripts as an author as well as how to best review a man- uscript when invited to do so by a journal editor.
We also had the oppor- tunity to hear from Paul Ridgewell (Westpork Pty Ltd) and Robert Hewitt (SunPork Solutions), two of the six Course 1 gradu-
☛ continued P3
by HEATHER CHANNON Research and Innovation General Manager
The author as well as Laura Latimer-Marsh and Weicheng Zhao attended the Red Meat Postgrad Conference.
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