Farm-Scape, Episode 2147

The Saskatchewan Pork Development Board expects the majority of Saskatchewan producers to begin the certification process under the Canadian Pork Council's Animal Care Assessment tool next year.

The Animal Care Assessment Tool was developed as a voluntary stand alone component of Canadian Quality Assurance in an effort to provide domestic and international consumers an assurance that farm animals are humanely treated.

In Saskatchewan 18 CQA validators have now been certified to conduct ACA assessments and a handful of operations have already tentatively booked audits on a pilot basis.

Sask Pork producer services manager Harvey Wagner says most farms are already following the protocols.

Basically pretty much 90 percent of the protocols that are in the ACA are common practice on all farms and there may be adjustments for a few of them but it's pretty common.

There's going to be very little adjustment is going to be needed on pretty well all our farms.

It's just basically sitting down and putting pen to paper and having a clear protocol and provide staff training to make sure they're following the protocols on the ACA.

Not all producers have seen it yet but those that have have basically said, OK this is information and we'll see how we can incorporate it into our operation right now and more people will probably be doing the validations, I expect, next year and the year after but mostly now it's just kind of absorbing what's there and saying OK this will work with us, maybe some things are going to be a little bit more of a challenge for us but basically they're just taking it as information and using it to figure out how they should be operating their farms and writing their protocols and that type of thing.

Wagner says there will be a few farms that will have to make some adjustments but he expects those adjustments to be pretty minimal.

He's confident most farms in Saskatchewan will find very little difficulty in meeting the requirements.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

Farm-Scape is sponsored by Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork.