The manager of PigTrace Canada says the use of mobile devices has been the most popular method for reporting the movements of swine to the PigTrace database.
Since July, 2014 under Canada’s Health of Animals Regulation both the shipper and receiver of swine have been required to report all swine movements to PigTrace Canada as part of Canada’s livestock traceability initiative.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says there are several reporting options to choose from.
We have a variety of reporting tools. We know not everyone is technically capable of either logging into our database on a computer or mobile phone. We also have for either larger companies or anyone who has their own movement reporting or their own inventory tracking system, whether it’s farm management software or an excel spreadsheet, they can synchronize their own data system right into PigTrace so there’s no duplication of effort.
For people that don’t have technological tools, we have fax based reporting. We’ve printed up a lot of manifest booklets that people can fill out and fax into us.We also have voice message recording on our toll free number, that’s 1 866-300-1825. We provide instructions of what information to leave for us. That’s a nice option because it provides for us an audio message file to prove that this person did indeed report and the information is always there, we have it in the database.
Then we key in that information for that person and it’s the same for fax based reporting. In fact we do have some people sending in their reporting submissions by mail as well. The requirement is that they report to us within 7 days and that does seem to work. But, by and large, probably the most popular reporting tool is our mobile application. It works on any smart phone or iPod or any mobile device and it’s quite easy to use and it’s been quite popular with a lot of people.
For more information on PigTrace Canada’s swine traceability program visit pigtrace.ca.
