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Farm-Scape, Episode 1481

Input from Alberta swine producers shows strong support for national initiatives improve livestock tracking and traceability but concerns over costs and control.

Initiatives designed to expand Canada's ability to identify and track the movement of livestock, establish zoning in Canada and georeference livestock premises where explored this week at the Focus on the Future Conference in Red Dear.

Alberta Pork Assistant Manager Paul Hodgman says producers support these initiatives and have invested large amounts of money in biosecurity recognizing this is becoming a demand on the export side and important domestically but there are concerns.

"They are concerned, I think, like they are with all the initiatives going on, with 'who's going to pay for it and how do I receive some value back for this initiative through my product sale at the end of the day?'

I think a couple of other things that came out strongly, one was that they really believe producers have got to drive this initiative.

They think that producers have to control the data at the end of the day. This should rest with us. Obviously other groups will need access to it if you had a disease outbreak, CFIA and others, but in the interim period they strongly believe producers should control this.

The other main area that got tremendous support was the need to register anybody who has pigs whether they're in a zoo or are back yard animals, that sort of thing.

They are an important part of this whole process so we need to know where they are. I think there's pretty good support to get all the places georeferenced so we know exactly where the premises are so we can deal with disease in a quick and efficient manner".

Hodgman says the ultimate goal is get an efficient simple pragmatic system that works for disease control and put it in place as quickly as possible.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.