A devastating hog barn fire spurred the birth of the Manitoba Farm Safety project, and a recent one has reminded everybody about why livestock barns need better monitoring.
That’s what the Manitoba Pork Council and Manitoba’s farm safety program have been telling producers recently.
“There’s a need to be proactive rather than reactive,” Keith Castonguay, Manitoba Farm Safety’s director, said a few days after a fire destroyed most of a sow farm at Pansy in southeastern Manitoba, which killed 7,000 sows and piglets.
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The program is offering farm inspections that use infrared cameras in barns and other buildings to find hot spots in the electrical system.
Generally those hot spots are in places farmers can’t see, so using the cameras highlights problems that would normally never be discovered.
Hog barn fires occur every year somewhere in Canada and tend to quickly get out of control. The most likely source of fire for a barn is the electrical system, although that is hard to prove after a fire.
“A lot of them are assigned to electrical, but they’re hard to assign because the fires are so all-consuming,” said Castonguay, an electrician by training.
At its fall meetings, the pork council talked about the program and the inspections it offers. The safety program was set up by Keystone Agricultural Producers with money it received from the Growing Forward 2 program.
Castonguay said proactive, problem-spotting inspections are badly needed by livestock producers because not much else seems likely to reduce fire risks.
The regulatory approach focuses on regulations and compliance rather than risk reduction. Farmers themselves haven’t been able to significantly lower the incidents of fire.
“They’re not going down,” said Castonguay, who added he was stunned to find farm fire statistics on a flat line rather than a declining trend line when he got involved with farm safety.
However, there is a real chance that voluntary, pre-emptive inspections highlighting incipient electrical problems can reduce the number of fires in livestock operations, said Castonguay.
At some point farmers might have to do these sorts of inspections anyway, he said.
While Manitoba insurance companies aren’t generally requiring this sort of occasional monitoring, Ontario insurers appear to be requiring them in many cases, he said.
