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 1504

Sask Pork reports over 95 percent of Saskatchewan's hogs are now produced on farms certified under the Canadian Quality Assurance program.

Canadian Quality Assurance is the Canadian swine industry's national on farm food safety program. Last August Sask Pork targeted a 95 percent enrolment within six months.

Producer Services Manager Harvey Wagner says that target has now been met and the organization is working to take that number even higher.

"Right now we're at 96.35 percent of hogs marketed in Saskatchewan are marketed under the CQA program. Most of the larger units are on the program now.

There's a few units that aren't but we're hopeful they'll be on in a fairly short time. There's a lot of the smaller operations that are also becoming involved in the CQA program. What's driving it is, in part, the fact that most of the packers are quite aggressive in seeing that producers belong to the CQA program for food safety reasons.

The packers certainly would like to see that all the meat that they process and market is coming from a CQA herd in order to minimize any potential of drug residue problems and also other issues, health issues, zoonotic diseases and also physical contamination like broken needles and that type of thing.

The CQA program certainly addresses all of those issues in a fairly direct way".

Wagner says the CQA program is extremely valuable in terms of food safety and he expects virtually all of the pigs produced in Canada to be certified within the next few years.

He says some packers have actually stopped accepting hogs that originate from non-CQA herds while others have started severely discounting hogs that are not CQA certified.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.