Farmscape for November 15, 2017
| Full Interview 5:07 | Listen  |
Canadian Pork Excellence, Canada’s new on-farm food safety and animal care assurance program is expected to be ready for rollout out by the end of next year. The rollout of PigSafe Canada and PigCare Canada, the primary components of Canada’s new on-farm food safety and animal care assurance program, was among the topics of discussion last week when pork producers gathered for Manitoba Pork’s 2017 Fall Producer Meetings. Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork, explains PigSafe and PigCare are the re-envisioned versions of the Canadian Quality Assurance and Animal Care Assessment.
Clip-Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork:
The main idea about them is to bring in some of the Code of Practice requirements into the animal care assurance programs as well as update the food safety assurance programs. The key changes that are happening to the programs, for the food safety assurance program are just some updates to the programs to make sure that we’re continuing to meet market expectations on food safety and that we’re within the risk tolerance of our markets when it comes to food safety things. That’s very important to consumers and it’s very important to us as pork producers as well. On the animal care assurance side of things the big changes are really incorporating the Code of Practice requirements from 2014 into the assurance programs as another way to provide assurance to consumers that we have a certain standard for animal care and those are being met on farm.
Fynn notes the program, which has been under development since November 2014, has been twice revised following pilot testing and will undergo one more final revision. He expects the final draft to be ready by the summer of 2018 followed by a soft launch where producers can voluntarily join the program accompanied by producer and validator training with full rollout set for January 2019.
For Farmscape.Ca, I’m Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Por
