Farm-Scape, Episode 1679

The President and CEO of Humboldt, based Big Sky Farms says a soon to be released animal care component of Canadian Quality Assurance will provide the animal welfare assurance most consumers want.

A new animal care assessment tool, developed to become a component of the CQA program, will be made available to Canadian swine producers beginning early in the new year.

Florian Possberg, who sat on the committee that developed the assessment tool, says most consumers expect a certain level of care from their food source.

"The consumer is the boss. The consumer says they want food safety, they want good ethics to be involved in the production of their food and this is really providing them with that assurance that we, as producers, are doing that.

Quite frankly there's a very very tiny portion of the industry that does not meet these standards at this time.

It's our commitment as an industry to identify those individuals and make sure they're brought to task for the care of their animals.

We think this is an exciting development for us. We believe that not only do our Canadian consumers expect a high level of care for our animals but also our international consumers.

In fact, because we export more than 50 percent of the pork we produce here in Canada, by including animal welfare in our Canadian Quality Assurance we can provide assurance to consumers around the world that our food is not only safe but it's also produced in an ethical manner."

Possberg says acceptable care of animals is just good business and it's only a very tiny portion of the industry that does not meet these minimum standards.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.