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Page 6 %u2013 Australian Pork Newspaper, October 2024 www.porknews.com.auWITH the importance of good hygiene more prevalent than ever, farms are turning toward best practice washing routines.Through its partnership with MS Schippers, Stockyard Industries is now supplying MS TopFoam %u2013 a foaming detergent capable of hanging onto a vertical surface for up to an hour, allowing considerable contact time for breaking down the fat and protein resistance barriers to leave a clean, bug-free surface.Windridge Farms in NSW and JW & GE Bourke Pty Ltd in Victoria are two of the many customers that have introduced TopFoam to their farms%u2019 wash cycles and have provided excellent insight into how the product has been working for them.Steve Hawkes, farm manager at JW & GE Bourke said he uses TopFoam in the HyBag form, a 1.134kg sealed bag used with its own delivery system, because it was easy to use with no time wasted manually mixing chemicals.The reduction of risk for staff and requirement for less PPE equipment was a bonus.They%u2019ve previously used other foaming agents across the farm but none of them hang to a surface as long as TopFoam.Using TopFoam has not only helped achieve better cleaning results but has also reduced the time taken to complete a wash.JW & GE Bourke Pty Ltd recently built a new farrowing shed consisting of five rooms with 28 crates each.A clean typically uses one full HyBag per room of 28 crates with an average time saving of approximately 1.5 hours per wash.Not only does it speed up washing, but swab results show that it also leaves a far cleaner surface containing less pathogens.Windridge Farms has also seen considerable time savings and improved results.Their experience with TopFoam was that it was safe and easy to use, and its impressive cleaning results meant they would highly recommend it IN August, Australian Pork Limited was very proud to release the first report against the Pork Sustainability Framework.The Baseline Report sets the starting point for measuring progress against the targets and measures within the pork Framework and will allow us to see where we are making gains as well as areas that may need more focus and support as we develop future reports for comparison.This report has been a long time in development as it was critical to ensure that we were as open and transparent as possible with the data we were sharing and utilised the best sources available.This meant waiting for the publication of the 2020 and 2022 pork Lifecyle Assessment (LCA) results in May this year to provide a strong, peer reviewed dataset for some of the planet measures.This report is a good starting point and celebrates the achievements of the pork industry to date.This is evident not only in the data tables but through the stories shared about the work undertaken in each of the focus areas within the framework, such as the ongoing success of the FightMND campaign which supports the wider Australian community.While sustainability reporting is very strongly data driven to provide assurance of actual gains and avoid greenwashing, it is equally important to share the context around these activities and the stories of growth and change that may not have all the data currently available.The Baseline Report is very open about this.Not all the measures have data against them and that%u2019s OK.It%u2019s about being honest with where we are at and, as a smaller industry, we do not have the same amount of public data available compared to some other industries.We acknowledge these gaps and look forward to working on and improving as we go.The Baseline Report is a means to share the realities of the industry as well.It acknowledges the challenges of labour availability, disease management, supply chain disruption, climate change, welfare and greenhouse gas emissions.Acknowledging these important factors not only gives those outside the industry more context but operates as an open invitation for others to work with us to reduce their impacts and provides opportunities to benefit the industry, our rural communities and the entire Australian agricultural sector - as none of these issues are unique to pork alone.It%u2019s also about celebrating our wins and surprising ourselves with how well we are already doing.This is a powerful narrative that we can use to show Australia that we are a progressive and leading industry.The successes can be clearly seen in the data from the Planet Pillar, which has been picked up and shared in the media this month, such as:%u2022 Having a GHG emissions intensity of 3.3kg CO2 equivalent per kg of liveweight produced, including direct land use and land use change emissions %u2022 Being the first to quantify our nutrient impacts on waterways through an LCA method %u2022 78 percent of producers reuse effluent on crops %u2022 49 percent utilise solar power %u2022 44 percent recycle water on their farm.And there are more achievements across the other Pillars, for example in the Pig Pillar, we have discovered that our baseline measure for pre-weaning survivability which sits at 87.4 percent (data from the industry benchmarking report) is already above the target that had been set at 85 percent.This is exciting and shows that the industry is well advanced.There are opportunities to continue to maintain this high standard and share the learnings with other producers to further improve their performance.We have used these industry statistics and made them more relatable through sharing the stories of producers such as Jock and Geordie Charles and Adelle and Jarad Smith.These stories of real businesses help to bring the stats to life and showcase the innovation already well established in the industry, as well as the human faces that aren%u2019t always seen.The Pork Sustainability Framework has always been a document meant to be reviewed and improved upon over time.With the insights now gathered from the completion of the Baseline Report it is now time to undertake a review and see where the target and measures can be improved and refined.To help this process, and in keeping with the spirit of collaboration and industry ownership through which the Framework was originally developed, APL is in the process of appointing a Pork Sustainability Reference Group made up of industry representatives, a suite of external experts, supply chain participants and community representation.This group will consider the outcomes and learnings from the Baseline report and review the underlying Framework to make recommendations on improvements that could be made in both the Framework and the reporting.This work is critical to ensure the Framework stays current and reflects the real aspirations of the industry and the broader Australian community in delivering a sustainable pork industry. Ready, set, go on pork sustainability reportingClimate Friendly Farmingby GEMMA WYBURN*To reduce lung lesions Fostera Gold PCV MH contains inactivated recombinant chimeric porcine circovirus type 1 containing the porcine circovirus type 2a open reading frame 2 (ORF2) protein, inactivated recombinant chimeric porcine circovirus type 1 containing the porcine circovirus type 2b (ORF2) protein and inactivated Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae strain.Zoetis Australia Pty Ltd. ABN 94 156 476 425. Level 6, 5 Rider Boulevard, Rhodes NSW 2138. %u00a9 2024 Zoetis Inc. All rights reserved. ZL1958B...SO SHOULDY O U R PROTECTIONTHE ONLYvaccines withTWO PCV2GENOTYPESprotecting againstPCV2a, PCV2b& PCV2d*UNIQUE FORMULATION SINGLE OR SPLIT DOSET H R E A T S ADAPT...T H R E A T S ADAPT...Stockyard Industries demonstrates excellent results following the launch of MS TopFoam cleaning agentMS TopFoam is providing exceptional cleaning results for farms in Australia.* continued P7