By Bruce Cochrane.
The Canadian Pork Council expects all of Canada's pork producers to be operating under its new on farm food safety and animal care program by the end of 2021.
The Canadian Pork Council is completing the final updates of its new on farm food safety and animal care assurance program.
Canadian Pork Council Executive Director John Ross explains Canadian Pork Excellence is the umbrella that captures the three programs that Canadian pork producers follow.
John Ross-Canadian Pork Council:
One is PigTrace, our traceability program.
The second one is the certified quality assurance program which is our on farm food safety program and the third one is our animal care assessment or animal care program.
Those last two, we're in the process now of rebuilding and eventually, when we get them all finished and rolled out, we're going to call them PigSafe, which is the food safety program and PigCare which would be our animal care program.
Those three, PigTrace, PigSafe and PigCare would form the Canadian Pork Excellence Program.
The new programs, PigSafe and PigCare, we hope that we'll have them nicely finished this summer and ready for producers to use if they choose to use them.
We're anticipating having a soft launch of the program late summer 2018 and we're working toward that goal now.
We expect to have the program completely launched, in place, locked down and ready to go January 1, 2019 and it's at that point that we'll have a formal launch of the program.
As producers come up through their normal validation cycle, so if your full validation is due in 2019, we're going to work with the new programs at that point in time and over the course of the following three years, 2019, 2020 and 2021 we'll roll that program out to every farm in Canada.
Ross says we need to reach out to Canadians and help them understand what we do on the farm and why and these are the programs that are going to help us do that.
Source: Farmscape