Growing Assurance-Food Safety On-Farm Program Now Available

By Bruce Cochrane

Manitoba Pork is encouraging the province's pork producers to apply for funding being made available to improve on-farm food safety, biosecurity, animal welfare and workplace health and safety under the Growing Assurance-Food Safety On-Farm program.

Applications are being accepted for the Growing Assurance-Food Safety On-Farm program until the end of December.

Mark Fynn, an animal care specialist with Manitoba Pork, explains the program was developed under Growing Forward 2 and provides funds to help adopt assurance systems and best management practices on the farm.

Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork:
The program covers things from food safety to biosecurity, animal welfare and workplace health and safety for swine producers.
There's quite a bit of money available for individual producers.

For food safety we're looking at $2,000, for biosecurity we're looking at $10,000, animal welfare is $3,700and workplace health and safety is $500 that's available to producers to apply for.

Any swine producer that has a CQA registration, which is the Canadian Quality Assurance Food Safety program and the ACA, the animal welfare component of that is eligible to apply for most of these things.
The biosecurity component of this program additionally requires them to have attended a biosecurity workshop put on by a vet and have a vet out to their site to do an assessment of the site but all in all it's open to those CQA registered producers.

Fynn notes applications are being accepted on a first come first served basis so it makes sense to apply sooner rather than later.

He says anyone interested in the program can obtain more information by accessing the Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development or Manitoba Pork web sites or by calling 204-235-2302 or 204-945-5402.

Source: Farmscape