Animal Welfare Main Motivator for Improving Truck Wash Technology

The president of Truck Wash Technologies says animal welfare is the primary motivation behind efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of equipment and strategies designed to clean and disinfect swine transport vehicles

Truck Wash Technologies designs and builds custom automated truck wash systems focussing on complex cleaning applications and is one of the partners involved in a Swine Innovation Porc initiative aimed at speeding up and reducing the cost of cleaning and disinfecting swine transport trailers.

Jyrki Koro, the President of Truck Wash Technologies and a member of the Swine Innovation Porc Truck Wash Advisory Group, says finding a cost-effective way of improving the biosecurity aspect while minimising downtime is first and foremost.

“There’s keen interest in mitigating disease spread and it has been established quite clearly that animal transport is one of the main vectors of transmitting“ 

 

“The goal is to be able to minimize human involvement in the cleaning process and also finding a method can be done economically and effectively. There are challenges, there’s no doubt about it. 

“Livestock is traveling south and disease spreads, as we’ve learned through this current pandemic that we’re going through.

“Obviously, there’s a keen interest in mitigating disease spread and it has been established quite clearly that animal transport is one of the main vectors of transmitting disease from one animal to the other so there’s some substantial reasons as to why we want to develop a system like this.

“The idea of euthanizing and destroying animals when they’re infected in various industries, from the research we’ve done, the cost is quite substantial so obviously animal welfare is first and foremost in the thought process.”

Koro acknowledges every trailer is not the same so there’s no silver bullet solution.