The Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork says Canada’s new on-farm pork quality and animal welfare assurance program matches and exceeds those being offered in other countries.

The Canadian Pork Council’s new-on farm food safety and animal care assurance program, Canadian Pork Excellence, is being pilot testing on over 80 farms across Canada.

The new program consists of PigSafe, the food safety component, PigCare, the animal welfare component, PigTrace, Canada’s traceability program and includes provisions for additional add on programs.

Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork, says the update brings the program in line with new public food safety and animal care expectations and keeps pace with Canada’s main competitor.

Canadian pork’s main competitor is really U.S. pork so we look to what the U.S. is doing as far as on farm assurance programs and the assurances they’re providing to their buyers. They’ve been applying the PQA Plus program for awhile which incorporates food safety and animal care.

In addition to that a number of retailers and processors expect random audits to happen on farm and they’ve been doing the common swine industry audit which looks at animal care requirements and making sure that management is good on farm.

They also have the expectation, through the PQA Plus program, that there be training in place for all the barn management that are implementing the program. So some of the major changes that we’re incorporating into PigSafe Canada and PigCare Canada are those that we’re already seeing in the U.S.

~ Mark Fynn, Manitoba Pork

Fynn says, when the pilot project wraps up next month, feedback will be collected from participating producers and validators to see what they liked about the program and suggestions for improvement, the documents will be revised and the program will hopefully be rolled out this fall so that by 2018 all full validations are going through the CPE platform.