Effective 1 January 2012, compliance with the requirements of the Animal Care Assessment programme will become a mandatory component of the Canadian Quality Assurance programme, the Canadian pork industry's on-farm food safety programme.

Sask Pork producers services manager Harvey Wagner says the Animal Care Assessment programme is a written set of protocols that help focus the farm's attention on animal care and assess its performance in relation to the codes of practices other standards available in the industry.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

It's kind of broken down into sections.

There's a general section that applies to every farm regardless of what type it is.

Then there's three sections, one on sound piglets, one on weaned pigs which is like the nursery pigs and the grow-finish pigs and they have specific questions that apply only to those areas if those animals are present.

Most of the questions, it's a manual with questions imbedded in the manual.

Most of the questions are check boxes but some need written plans or procedures and there's a series of 15 appendices that come with the ACA to help farms develop those particular plans or procedures and they vary on things like what do you do if there's an electrical outage or what do you do for euthanasia or what do you do with pigs that are ill, just a whole series of things like that.

Mr Wagner says most people are already producing pigs in compliance with the Animal Care Assessment programme.

He says amalgamating the Animal Care Assessment and Canadian Quality Assurance programmes means producers will only need to undergo one validation and it will bring the Canadian industry more in step with its international trading partners.