New Programme Keeps Pace with Competition

CANADA - The Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programmes with Manitoba Pork says Canada's new on farm pork quality and animal welfare assurance programme matches and exceeds those being offered in other countries, according to Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 27 April 2017
clock icon 3 minute read

The Canadian Pork Council's new on farm food safety and animal care assurance programme, Canadian Pork Excellence, is being pilot testing on over 80 farms across Canada.

The new programme consists of PigSafe, the food safety component, PigCare, the animal welfare component, PigTrace, Canada's traceability programme and includes provisions for additional add on programmes.

Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programmes with Manitoba Pork, says the update brings the programme in line with new public food safety and animal care expectations and keeps pace with Canada's main competitor.

Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork

Canadian pork's main competitor is really US pork so we look to what the US is doing as far as on farm assurance programmes and the assurances they're providing to their buyers.

They've been applying the PQA Plus programme for awhile which incorporates food safety and animal care.

In addition to that a number of retailers and processors expect random audits to happen on farm and they've been doing the common swine industry audit which looks at animal care requirements and making sure that management is good on farm.

They also have the expectation, through the PQA Plus programme, that there be training in place for all the barn management that are implementing the programme.

So some of the major changes that we're incorporating into PigSafe Canada and PigCare Canada are those that we're already seeing in the US.

Mr Fynn says, when the pilot project wraps up next month, feedback will be collected from participating producers and validators to see what they liked about the programme and suggestions for improvement, the documents will be revised and the programme will hopefully be rolled out this fall so that by 2018 all full validations are going through the CPE platform.

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