The Portage Rotary Club and the Portage & District Chamber of Commerce held their joint meeting on April 26th, with the president of the Bioscience Association of Manitoba (BAM) speaking.

Kim Kline wants to share how influential bioscience has been for the province in terms of exporting goods. She explains Bioscience can be broken up into three subgroups, being agricultural bioscience, health bioscience, and clean bioscience.

"I think, being here in Portage la Prairie, I wanted to showcase to some of the members a little bit more about the agriculture biotech piece," notes Kline. "That's a huge piece of what's going on in the Portage area."

While clean bioscience tends to focus on things that impact the planet in a positive light and health bioscience looks to make advancements in the world of medicine, agricultural bioscience looks at the food we eat, and how to improve it. The most popular instance of bioscience in the city is the Roquette pea processing plant.

The other large part of bioscience that Manitoba benefits from is called medicaments.

"Medicaments are medicines and therapeutics for animals and human health, as well as vitamins," explains Kline. "Medicaments is the number one export in Manitoba at $2.1 billion and has been the number one export since 2018."

To learn more about the bioscience advancements taking place in the province, go to BAM's website here.