Farmscape for June 30, 2014

The manager of producer services with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board says the majority of the province's pork producers and the larger pork processors are prepared for new rules which require reporting of pig movements in Canada.
Effective July 1, under changes to Canada's Health of Animals Regulation, anyone who ships or receives pigs in Canada will be required to report the movement of those animals to the PigTrace Canada database within seven days.
Last week the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board completed a series of six town hall meetings, including two webinars, to outline the new requirements and demonstrate the various tools available for reporting.
Harvey Wagner, the manager of producers services with Sask Pork, says producers are quite interested in how the system works and how they can interact with it.

Clip-Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
A lot of the producers seem to be quite prepared and ready to go and we've had some farms that are inputting data right now.
The plants I think are fairly prepared, the major federal plants.
Some of the smaller plants and some of the abattoirs, are not prepared and there's going to be a fair bit of work to do with them over the next six months to get them informed in their responsibilities to report and how to do it so that will be the challenge.
The other thing is to touch some of the smaller producers that aren't commercial in the normal sense that are moving pigs around.
Part of the program is to capture all pig movement including farmed wild boar so that will be a bit of a change for us but we'll have to accommodate that and try and catch those producers.

Wagner encourages producers get set up on the system, obtain their log-in information from their provincial pork office and start reporting movements as soon as possible.
For more information visit the PigTrace Canada web site at pigtrace.ca.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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