By Bruce Cochrane.
Livestock producers who have not already registered the locations on which they have animals are being encouraged to do so.
Premise Identification Blitz Week, a national effort involving the federal and provincial governments and the various livestock commodity groups to encourage producers who have not already done so to register their operations and obtain premise identification numbers, kicked off Monday.
Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, explains the goal is to remind livestock operators of the importance of premise identification numbers for traceability, emergency response to food safety or animal health issues as well as floods or fires.
Jeff Clark-Canadian Pork Council:
The pork industry was a real leader on the premises identification file and this goes back to 2005-2006 when the provincial pork organizations all agreed to register locations.
That would be with the actual certificate of title, legal land description of the property.
What we didn't have at that time, what is now the provincial governments, we didn't have an agency to register a unique standardized number for that piece of land and we really needed provincial governments to do that and the provincial agriculture ministers agreed to do so back in 2007.
Since that time we've had provincial governments validate the location and the ownership of the piece of land as well as the multi-species.
If they have cattle and pigs they'll get one number for that property, which is what we want for animal health and food safety emergencies and traceability as well as if there's any evacuations due to forest fires or floods to really have an idea of how many animals are on that piece of land.
Clark says Premise Identification Blitz Week is a reminder to all livestock owners, whether they have pigs, cattle, goats or a couple of sheep, what ever they have, to get a premise identification number.
Source: Farmscape