The manager of PigTrace Canada says tools designed to accommodate the mandatory reporting of movements of pigs within Canada to accommodate swine traceability are now available for use.
The Canadian pork industry has been working on the development of a traceability program for swine since 2002 and the program is now ready for launch.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, explains the program will require the reporting of movement information when animals are received or shipped.
That movement information includes the source or destination of the load of animals, the license plate, the date and time animals were loaded, the number of animals as well as any official animal identification numbers that are on them.
We’ve finished completing all of our movement reporting tools.
Two of them are web based so they’re available now through our PigTrace web site either on a computer of any kind of smart phone.
If you go to pigtrace.ca you can log in to the database from there.
We will be issuing all of our producers and pork value chain people such as abattoirs and assembly yards their own log-in accounts and passwords so they can log into the system.
The third type of movement reporting tool that we have is intended to work with software companies that have herd management software in the barns.
There’s a number of companies like that.
We have an instruction manual for their programmers to modify their software so that it can submit information to PigTrace directly from the software.
That way producers aren’t having to enter the same information twice, once in their own barn and then again into PigTrace.
We want to avoid that.
Clark is targeting January 2014 to start promoting participation in the program to provide members of the pork value chain plenty of time to familiarize themselves with the system.
