Sask Pork Reports Majority of Pork Producers Complying with Mandatory Pig Movement Reporting

By Bruce Cochrane

The Saskatchewan Pork Development Board reports the vast majority of the province's pork producers are complying with new requirements for the mandatory reporting of pig movements.

Effective July 1, 2014 under changes to Canada's Health of Animals Regulation to accommodate swine traceability, both the shipper and receiver of pigs must report the source and destination of the load of animals, the license plate number of the truck that moved them, the date and time they were loaded, the number of animals and any official animal identification numbers on them to the PigTrace Canada database within seven days.

Mark Ferguson, the manager of industry and policy analysis with Sask Pork, reports the vast majority of people that move hogs are reporting those movements and most of those that are not simply aren't aware of the requirements and are just in the process of getting informed.

Mark Ferguson-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
When you move a pig from your farm to a slaughter plant it's very important that the pig has a tag or a tattoo on it.
It has to be physically identified and that is something that is new to a lot of people that ship to small plants especially in the province.
They've never put any identifying mark on the pigs before but, under the regulations, when you move a pig to slaughter you have to physically identify the pig.

In terms of the ways to get the data into the database, we have a web site that you can access on your computer and that's really the best method of getting your movement data in.

It takes about maybe a minute or two to put a movement into the system.

There's also a mobile web site that we have that you can access on your tablet or smart phone and it's optimized for that and thirdly, although we discourage it, we do allow movements to be faxed in as well.

For more on swine traceability contact your provincial pork association or visit the PigTrace Canada web site at pigtrace.ca.

Source: Farmscape