The Manager of PigTrace Canada reports data submitted to the PigTrace Canada database on swine movements has proved useful in resolving food safety issues as well as in helping to track Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
Since July 1, 2014 both shippers and receivers of swine have been required to report the movements of those animals to PigTrace Canada within 7 days as part of Canada’s livestock traceability system.
The intent of the program is to centralize swine movement information for use in trace back in the event of a food safety or animal health event.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says information collected trough the program has been used to address those types of situations.
On the food safety side, I won’t get into the details but we’ve had some certain abattoirs, if there’s issues found with certain pigs we have done trace backs for food safety reasons to determine the farms that they came from and that’s really helped our industry.
Marketers were previously getting blamed for one pig coming from one farm even though the marketer represents 200 farms. There just wasn’t the detail or information to know what farm an animal came from so often the marketer would take the blame and, in turn all of the producers that supply that marketer would take the blame.
PigTrace has really help to refine that. We’ve had some PED investigations, more just to compare with what’s been found on the ground and through the traditional means of phone calls.
I think now, we’re almost two years into the program, our quality of data is such that we can really rely on the use of it for trace back. We haven’t had any big disease outbreaks in Canada. PED is the focus right now and that’s been our use so far. ~ Jeff Clark-PigTrace Canada
Clark notes a few weeks ago the number of movements reported to PigTrace topped the 1 million mark, and that’s since July, 2014.
