Farm-Scape, Episode 2043

Manitoba Pork Council will begin distributing information packages early next month which outline the procedures that will be used for registering swine producers under the Canadian pork industry's new national swine traceability and identification system.

The Canadian pork industry is targeting 2008 as the date by which it intends to have full identification and traceability in place as a line of defense against the economic effects of a foreign animal disease outbreak.

Swine producers in each of the provinces will need to register their operations and will be issued new tattoo numbers.

Manitoba Pork Council Emergency Preparedness and Technical Affairs Specialist Jeff Clark says the first stage of the process is to register all producers to bring data inventories up to date.

"As part of that process we'll be collecting contact information such as the barn owner, barn manager because that may be a different person, phone numbers, addresses, the legal land description of the barn.

Beyond that we'll also be we'll also be collecting production information such as manure storage, manure application, barn size, like animal capacity.

In exchange we'll allocate new market tattoo numbers for animals going to slaughter, that being the shoulder slap tattoo that producers normally apply when they ship their animals to processing plants.

We'll also issue, under the Canadian Livestock Identification Agency program, a premise ID number which will actually allocate a unique identification number to their farm operation.

Each premise could have one or more tattoo numbers depending on their business practices so, if a producer wants to track their inventory in different ways, they can request a number of tattoo numbers but each of those will be specific to their operations. Clark says the hope is to have the registration process completed by April.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.