The manager of industry and policy analysis with Sask Pork reports, so far, the transition to mandatory reporting of the movement of pigs within Canada has been going smoothly.
As of July 1 anyone who ships or receives pigs within Canada, including producers, assembly yards, auction marts and processors, is required to report the number of pigs moved, their origin and destination, the time they were moved and the license number of the truck or trailer that did the transportation to the PigTrace Canada database within seven days of that movement.
Mark Ferguson, the manager of industry and policy analysis with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, notes we’ve always had a level of traceability because we’ve always applied tattoos to pigs going to slaughter for payment purposes so the changes are simply an extension of what was already being done.
When ever you have a new piece of software, it doesn’t matter if it’s using Microsoft Word or a new email program, there’s always a learning curve and it takes time to become familiar with it.
Those are most of the questions we’re getting right now is people logging in for the first time and figuring out how to log in and how to report their first movement and once they do it the first time we sure haven’t had many questions.
I think the whole process seems to be pretty logical and people are exited to get in their and do it and we’re seeing lots of movements put into the database right now.
Of course it’s one more thing to do.
Everybody is busy and it’s another administrative task to do but producers understand the reason why we’re doing it and that if we ever did have a foreign animal disease outbreak that this could be the thing that saves the industry.
Of course also it doesn’t hurt to have this tool in place with existing markets, the high value markets like Japan, it’s an important marketing piece to be able to have this type of system in place.
For more on the mandatory reporting of the movement of pigs, visit pigtrace.ca or contact your provincial pork organization.
