Farm-Scape, Episode 1566

A pilot project getting underway in three provinces is looking at the potential of achieving good traceability by tracking the movement of groups of swine from production to processing.

The group lot traceability study is being coordinated by AVC Inc. at the University of Prince Edward island and is part of a larger Canadian Pork Council traceability pilot project.

AVC CEO Wayne Hooper says the group lot study is looking at the advantages and disadvantages of tracking animals in groups.

"Our preposition is that it's more efficient, less expensive, less time consuming to track groups of animals than it might be to do individual animal IDs.

If we can achieve what's required by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Canadian customers, in terms of being able to deliver a traceability system by tracking groups of animals, we believe it will be more efficient, less expensive and less time consuming.

The pilot study involves farmers, producers and processors from three provinces, Manitoba, Quebec and Prince Edward Island.

What we're looking at are ways to collect data on the movement of animals from farm to farm, it might be from a sow unit to a nursery or from a nursery to a grow out operation or from grow out to a processing plant.

We have developed four different methods for producers to be able to report information by fax, by telephone, by internet and by data upload.

We're also evaluating those methods with farmers to determine which will be the one that's most preferred by producers.

The data collection has started in part and we expect that we'll be collecting data from all three provinces within the next couple of weeks."

Hooper says the data collection phase is underway now and will be complete with a report by the end of this calendar year.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.