By Bruce Cochrane
Sask Pork is encouraging Saskatchewan's farmed wild boar producers who have not yet done so to register their operations and start reporting animal movements to the PigTrace Canada database.
Since July 1, 2014 federal regulations have required hog producers in Canada to identify certain types of domestic pigs for movement and to report all movements to the PigTrace database, and as of July 1 of this year, those same requirements apply to movements of farmed wild boar.
Mark Ferguson, the manager of industry and policy analysis with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says the vast majority of domestic swine producers and slaughter plants are doing their movement reporting diligently and provincial pork organizations are now gearing up to accommodate producers of farmed wild boar.
Mark Ferguson-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
We don't have a really good handle on how many wild boar producers there are around the country.
At Sask Pork we've always registered domesticated swine producers.
We haven't had a lot to do with wild boar producers so it's kind of a new area for us and maybe that's one of the reasons that they delayed the regulations coming into effect for wild boar for a year, is because the organizations that are administering the traceability program, we don't have all of the wild boar producers registered and we weren't ready to go last year on wild boar.
Certainly we'd like to invite any wild boar producers to give us a call when they hear about this and we will get you to fill out a registration form and that's basically the first step.
Once we have your information we can send you an information kit, we can get your account set up in PigTrace and issue you a herd mark and, once you have all of that, you're basically in business.
For more information on the PigTrace program and the traceability equipment Ferguson recommends visiting the Canada PigTrace web site at PigTrace.Ca or calling Sask Pork at (306) 244-7752.
Source: Farmscape