By Bruce Cochrane
The chair of Manitoba Pork says the introduction of mandatory pig movement reporting will help enhance the competitive position of Canadian pork in international markets.
Effective July 1 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.
Tomorrow Manitoba Pork will host a Town Hall Phone-In Meeting to update producers on the latest with regards to Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea and to discuss mandatory reporting of pig movements.
Manitoba Pork Chair Karl Kynoch says the ability to trace animal movements is particularly valuable when dealing with disease.
Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork:
The faster that you can trace where the pigs have went when a disease shows up, and we'll use PED for an example, but when it shows up on a farm they need to do tracebacks.
They need to know where all the traffic has went forward from leaving that farm and they need to know all the traffic that has come into that farm in the last two week period.
If they have a traceability system and they know where all the pigs have went and come from it really speeds up the process of being able to get the disease under control and lock down some other barns until you can figure out if they have it or not.
It extremely speeds up the process and reduces the amount of cases that you get around.
Another important area that traceability comes into is export markets.
We have a tremendous amount of reliance on export markets.
In Manitoba we export 90 percent of the product and a lot of these other countries are wanting to know where their food comes from and they want to know that the food safety is followed up and traceability is one of the things that they look for.
They want to know that we can trace a problem back.
If something were to show up as a problem they want to know we can trace it back so it's also extremely important for maintaining some of our export markets.
Source: Farmscape