An educational video production company in White Fox, Saskatchewan has launched a new internet based delivery system for making available its training videos. Since 2001 DNL Farms has been producing videos to teach swine industry employees the skills they’ll need to work with pigs and last week the company launched a new internet based delivery system.
Over 90 videos, including a series on low stress pig handling and more than 40 skills training videos, 16 of which are also available in Spanish, can be purchased outright or on a pay per view basis.
DNL President Don Lidster explains delivery via the internet allows people to access only those they wish to view as opposed to having to buy an entire series on CD. Their targets are new staff training and then existing staff training with the pig handling. Lidster said three slaughter plants across Canada use the pig handling methods, while three large production units that are using the skills videos that we put together for them and then there’s two colleges across Canada that are using those same skills to teach their students giving them a wide cross section of use. Several breeding companies had the company produce videos for their purposes, too.
“Topics cover all sections of pig handling; looking after the farrowing section of the barn, that’s fostering litters, maintaining the litters, maintaining the sows, looking after the nursery areas, feeding and managing the water, managing the thermal environment in the nursery and the finisher which is about the same type of thing,” he said. “In the breeding area it goes into artificial insemination, feeding sows and again the whole handling issue.”
Lidster says DNL will be looking for feedback on its new system. He believes there is a lot of areas, not only in pig production but in all of agriculture, where people can use video to speed up the training process.