Farm-Scape, Episode 1603

The newly revised Canadian Quality Assurance program will place a much greater emphasis on cross checks to ensure an operation's outlined procedures are followed.

Canadian Quality Assurance is the Canadian pork industry's 'on farm' food safety program. As part of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency recognition process the Canadian Pork Council has revised the program's HACCP model and updated the accompanying producer manual and on farm assessment form.

Sask Pork Producer Services Manager Harvey Wagner says there will be more focus on monitoring and verification of procedures.

"This program is very careful on making sure the correct procedures are followed. Everybody's work has to be checked against what was done. That can be done by individuals.

The manager can check the work that's done by somebody in the whole operation or people can check other workers work just to see that they followed the procedures and haven't missed something or anent getting into a bad habit of doing something incorrectly. In an instance where a farmer has an owner-operator situation where nobody else works in the barn, that verification can be done by an outside party like a veterinarian or, in the odd case, a validator.

It has to be somebody else checking your work to make sure that you're doing it properly. That change will take effect when people come on the new program. There will be a lot more emphasis in the questions on verification and monitoring. There's going to be a whole section on that and all of the questions are going to be more detailed in terms of how the verification procedures work."

Distribution of updated program materials will begin by the end of this month and producers will be expected to begin the new program with their next validation. Wagner says all producers will be operating under the new guidelines by the end of next year.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.