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 1381

The Canadian Pork Council has started fine tuning key components of the Canadian Quality Assurance Program as part of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's official recognition process.

Canadian Quality Assurance is the pork industry's on farm food safety program and it's one of the programs being reviewed for official federal government recognition.

As part of phase one of the process a federal technical review team has examined the program and made a series of action needs requests or ANRs designed to improve the package.

National CQA Coordinator Dawn LeBlanc says those recommendations are now being incorporated into the program and the updated package will be re-submitted by month's end.

"They went through each of the forms of our HACCP model as well as the producer materials and each form has its own set of ANRs that we need to look at.

Most of these effect the HACCP model itself so it's that technical background document that we'll need to modify and the producers, at the end of the day, I expect will see minimal modifications to the documents that they're going to receive.

One of the things to keep in mind with that is that we have developed an updated version of the producer manual and the assessment form so there were changes that the technical review team have reviewed that the producer hasn't actually seen yet.

Some of the information they've asked us to flesh out in the producer manual is new information anyway and they've helped us to identify where we can provide some more and some better information to the producers to help them out in the implementation of the program"

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is expected to conduct its review of the updated materials by the end of February.

LeBlanc hopes to be in a position to begin distributing updated program materials to producers by early spring.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.