Sheep farmer hosts farm tour for new Guelph faculty

By Lilian Schaer for Livestock Research Innovation Corporation

Sheep and beef farmer Mike Swidersky hosted a group of new University of Guelph faculty members for a tour at his farm in Dufferin County in early October. The researchers have all recently come to Guelph as faculty in the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), Ontario Veterinary College (OVC), or College of Engineering and Physical Sciences (CPES).

The tour was part of a new mentorship program launched earlier this year by Livestock Research Innovation Corporation (LRIC) to connect early-stage faculty with the Ontario livestock industry. The initial cohort includes nine participants.

“Innovation requires many things, including sound research rooted in industry needs, strong working relationships between university faculty and industry, and effective technology transfer involving many organizations,” says LRIC CEO Mike McMorris.

“There is a growing number of faculty who work on research for the livestock sector but who are unfamiliar with the issues facing the industry, and this new mentorship program gives them a chance to gain some of those insights that will hopefully help them in their work,” he adds.

Swidersky farms with his wife Amber and their two children in Melancthon, also known as the high plains of Ontario on a farm that is 100 per cent perennial pasture with no hay or crops grown. Their farm business includes a commercial flock of annual pasture lambing ewes, custom grazing groups of steers and heifers and Amber’s cut flower business, Petals Flower Co (https://www.petalsflowerco.ca/).  

He’s passionate about pasture management and intensive grazing and has managed the local Grey Dufferin Community pasture for the past eight years. During the faculty tour, he answered a wide range of questions on animal health, climate change, grazing, carbon sequestration and more.

“I really appreciate academia and research: you have a keen interest in making the world a better place,” he said to the group, adding that research is particularly important to the sheep sector because it is such a small sector in Canada compared to countries like New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Carbon sequestration is one area where he’d like to see more research to document what is being sequestered and explore how farmers might be able to monetize those activities in the future - and it’s a topic that caught the attention of environmental engineering professor Rafael Santos.

“I was surprised and pleased to hear that sheep farmers understand and are promoting the role of pasture lands in sequestering carbon, and that they are keen to participate in carbon credit programs,” he says. “This is a topic that still requires much work and research, both from the technical side and from the policy and economics side, so there is an opportunity here for multidisciplinary collaboration. This is the type of insight from the real world that gets gears turning in the heads of academics.”

Samuel Workenhe is a veterinarian and researcher with the Ontario Veterinary College where he works on viral diseases. He joined the mentorship program to get a first-hand look at the livestock operations in Ontario and to better understand the health challenges farmers are facing.
“One of my lab’s research interests is to understand virus-host interactions as well as genetic engineering of viruses for producing vaccines and antivirals,” Workenhe explains. “On the tour, I came to understand that Toxoplasmosis causes a lot of abortions and economic losses in sheep farms, so the question I am asking myself is whether I am able to use my live attenuated viral vaccine platforms to express toxoplasma proteins so the lamb immune system can develop immunity against toxoplasma.”

The mentorship program includes ten sessions in a mix of webinar-style learning and visits to Ontario livestock and poultry farms. And although the original goal was to roll out all sessions this year, the programming for the first cohort is being spread out over a longer time span due to COVID-19.

In the first session, participants met each other and heard presentations from coalition industry groups including LRIC and Poultry Industry Council for a high level overview of the sector.

The second session introduced mentees to Ontario livestock and poultry organizations. Representatives from Chicken Farmers of Ontario, Ontario Broiler Hatching Egg and Chick Commission, Egg Farmers of Ontario, Canadian Poultry Research Council, Ontario Sheep Farmers, Veal Farmers of Ontario, Ontario Pork, Beef Farmers of Ontario, and Dairy Farmers of Ontario each presented an overview of their sector, their support for research, and their advice for early career researchers.

“We had exceptional industry participation,” notes McMorris. “The key advice for researchers was around the importance of building a relationship with industry and a need for much improved technology transfer.”

In addition to the Swidersky farm, participants also visited a beef farm near Fergus as part of their tour.

More information about LRIC’s mentorship program is available here or by contacting LRIC at 519-766-5464 or info@livestockresearch.ca.

This article was published in the December 2020 edition of Sheep News.

Mentorship program participants

Name	Faculty	Research interests
Jennifer Ellis	Department of Animal Biosciences, OAC	Dairy nutrition and poultry modelling
Amin Komeili	School of Engineering, CPES	Soft tissue mechanics
Huiyan Li	School of Engineering, CPES	Medical biosensing and micro/nanofabrication
Heather Murphy	Department of Pathobiology, OVC	Water quality and public health
Erica Pensini	School of Engineering, CPES	Green process engineering, soil remediation, water treatment
Dave Renaud	Department of Population Medicine, OVC	Dairy calf health and welfare
Rafael Santos	School of Engineering, CPES	Carbon capture, use and sequestration; solid waste and wastewater treatment; environmental remediation
Charlotte Winder	Department of Population Medicine, OVC	Dairy cattle and small ruminant health and pain management
Samuel Workenhe	Department of Pathobiology, OVC	Immunotherapies for cancer; vaccine and antiviral development for livestock diseases