Farm-Scape, Episode 1647

Sask Pork reports over 99 percent of the hogs produced in Saskatchewan now originate from farms that are enrolled in the Canadian Quality Assurance program.

Canadian Quality Assurance is the Canadian swine industry's national on-farm food safety program. The program is based on HACCP, or hazard analysis at critical control points, under which specific areas where problems could develop are closely monitored and documented to avoid difficulties before they occur.

Sask Pork Producer Services Manager Harvey Wagner says, at year end July 31st, 393 producers from 317 production units were enrolled in the program.

"In Saskatchewan we have excellent participation by our producers in the CQA program. A lot of producers enrolled early and are sticking with the program. We have a number of farms now that have been on the program since 1998.

99.68 percent of the hogs sold in Saskatchewan came from farms enrolled in the program and 98.3 percent of the hogs sold are from fully recognized validated farms.

Farms where the hogs are raised are doing as good a job as possible in reducing any potential difficulties in terms of food safety.

Food safety issues are really important and anything you can do to prevent recalls is very useful. The packers are pretty much all requesting that our producers be with the CQA program in Saskatchewan.

All our major packers are certainly across Western Canada so that certainly is driving a lot more producers to be involved in the CQA program.

There's a few smaller farms that don't raise terribly many hogs that aren't enrolled or fully validated at this time but a lot of them are looking at the program and working towards it as well right now."

Canadian Quality Assurance carries the HACCP principles in place at the packing plants back to the farm gate and more and more customers around the world are demanding the those food quality assurances.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.