Effective 1 July, under changes to Canada's Health of Animals Regulation, anyone who ships or receives pigs in Canada will be required to report the movement of those animals to the PigTrace Canada database within seven days.

To help producers familiarize themselves with the new requirements and options for reporting the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board is hosting a series of PigTrace town hall meetings which wraps up this week.

Harvey Wagner, the manager of producer services with Sask Pork says the system will be particularly valuable for tracking disease.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

The idea is to be able to track down the movement of hogs almost in real time.

Farms do have a period of seven days to report but most of the time movement reporting will be done much sooner than that.

The idea is that we can see, if there's a disease issue on a farm or at a packing plant, we can fan out fairly quickly to understand where those animals went, where any of the transportation equipment that moved those animals, where they've had contact with other pigs so if we have a situation, PED is the most recent example, we can say a particular truck hauled pigs that were infected with PED, where did that truck go after that and what are the risks to those farms so we can do a fairly quick turn around on knowing what's happened.

Certainly it could be more important even for something like foot and mouth but, for any of those diseases, it's a really helpful tool to be able to know what's going on.

It's important for domestic supplies and it's also important for the ability to maintain our export markets.

For more information on the new requirements or on the series of producer meetings visit saskpork.com.