The manager of PigTrace Canada reports the system that will accommodate swine traceability in Canada is now in place and will be ready to start accepting reports of swine movements within the next couple of weeks.
Pig Trace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, is the official swine traceability program for the Canadian swine industry.
Pork producers on hand for Manitoba Swine Seminar 2013, underway today and tomorrow in Winnipeg, will have the opportunity to see how the new system will operate.
PigTrace manager Jeff Clark explains the main components of the traceability program are premise identification, so the location of facilities that may house or come into contact with pigs, the reporting of animals movements and in some cases the reporting of any identification numbers that are present on those animals.
The foundation to the traceability program is premises identification and that has been rolled out mostly in partnership with our provincial pork offices and the provincial governments.
Manitoba Pork, we’ve worked really closely with Manitoba Agriculture here in Manitoba to get unique premises ID numbers out to every farm and from there, what we built with PigTrace, is a user friendly easy way to record and report movements from one facility to another.
Our database has been complete for quite some time.
We’ve gone through quite a bit of testing and some training with our provincial staff throughout Canada.
Here in Manitoba we’re poised to actually start receiving movements.
Myself personally as the Manitoba Pork staff member in charge I’m just in the process of uploading location and producer information into the system so we can create accounts and start receiving movements from producers so we’re there right now.
We can start receiving movements in the next week or two.
Clark says the primary benefit is to provide a rapid trace back if there’s a crisis in the industry but we know that doesn’t happen very often so other potential benefits are being looked at such as surveillance for production diseases.
