The schedule for transitioning from Canadian Quality Assurance to Canadian Pork Excellence will be impacted by efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19. To allow pork producers to comply with Public Health Agency of Canada COVID-19 directions, the Canadian Pork Council is allowing on-farm visits to validate the PigSAFE and PigCARE components of the new Canadian Pork Excellence Program to be postponed.
Ravneet Kaur, the Producer Services Manager with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says the delay will have a minimal effect on the overall schedule and no effect on actual pork quality.
Clip-Ravneet Kaur-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
Right now, as far as Saskatchewan is concerned, we didn't have any farms on the newer CPE program in 2019. We will be having a couple of farms who would be transitioning to the new CPE PigSAFE-PigCARE program this year. We do have a majority of the farms still on the Canadian Quality Assurance programs.
We don't have any full validations scheduled for the CQA program this year. All the farms are scheduled for partial validations and they would go as usual. The farms that will be transitioning to the full PigSAFE-PigCARE program this year do have this option of extending their anniversary dates by three months for now, depending upon how this virus behaves.
There is a risk of full validations competing with this public health crisis because the veterinarian would have to actually complete a full validation by visiting the farm and that puts everybody involved in the process at risk. That was why it was decided that these full validations apply for extensions because full validations need the validator to actually go into the barn and complete them. That was why we're starting with a three month extension.
Source : Farmscape