Farmscape for December 16, 2004  (Episode 1670)

The President and CEO of Humboldt, based Big Sky Farms says a new animal care assessment tool modeled after Canadian Quality Assurance will weed out the few who fail to meet minimum animal welfare standards.

A new animal care assessment tool, modeled after the CQA program, will be made available to Canadian swine producers beginning early in the new year.

Florian Possberg, who sat on the committee that developed the resource, says 99.9 percent of consumers just want to know there are good standards and that they are being maintained.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Big Sky Farms

As responsible producers we all strive to attain a high level or a high standard.

I think today, though, as we're getting larger operations and we are selling our products to consumers that are farther and farther removed from the farms the consumer is demanding a level of assurance that we operate our business in an animal welfare friendly manner.

We've put together minimum standards that we expect all producers to maintain and what we're really trying to do is determine those very few who don't meet minimum standards for the care of our animals and say, "that's just not acceptable for ourselves as professional food producers."

We want to find out if an operation is not meeting the standard that we weed those out of our food system because the consumer just wants to know their food is safe and is produced in an ethical manner.

Possberg says anyone at a low level of animal welfare will need to either raise that standard or discontinue providing food to the professional food chain.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council