Farm-Scape is sponsored by Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork Play Audio Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork.

Farm-Scape, Episode 1334

The Canadian Pork Council had identified geo-referencing as a key component to any national system for tracing the movement of livestock in Canada.

The Canadian Pork Council is cooperating with several commodity groups on a project to develop a national GPS, or Global Positioning System, to catalogue all farm buildings in Canada. It's intended to become part of a national system for tracking the movement of livestock.

CPC Agriculture Policy Analyst Eric Aubin says a national geo-referencing system will allow quick identification of the building in which an animal being traced was raised.

"The geo-referencing of the swine premises have been identified by the Canadian Pork Council Board of Directors as one priority, as a key component, leading to a national traceability system.

What I mean by geo-referencing is that we would have the longitude and latitude of every swine premises where hogs are being raised, slaughtered, rendered, auctioned and also have some information about these premises.

Having this information nationwide would really help in upgrading the quality of our traceability system.

We'll be in a position to, with a traceability system, identify the live animal movements and, with the geo referencing also identify exactly all the farm buildings where these hogs were raised.

This is the reason why the CPC is doing a lot of activities in order that the implementation of digital referencing will be done fairly quickly."

Aubin says, because there are a lot of mixed farms in Canada, a multi-commodity approach to geo-referencing is being adopted rather than having each commodity group develop its own GPS system.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.