Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, said compliance with mandatory swine movement reporting continues to build with about 11,300 movements nationally being reported each week.

Speaking to the annual meeting of the Manitoba Pork Council in April Clark said since July 2014, under Canada’s Health of Animals Act, both the shipper and receiver of swine must report animal movements to PigTrace Canada within seven days.

“Really, anyone with a pet pig, the requirements are that the movement data, the source destination, sites, be reported to PigTrace both that move out and move in. People have seven days to report that information,” said Clark. “Also part of that would be the vehicle license plate and the number of pigs as well as any animal identification that’s required such as for shipping to slaughter or to an auction facility.”

Clark said of the total 12,100 premises across Canada registered including rendering facilities, auctions, assembly yards, and abattoirs, but the vast majority are farms.

“When we started out, it was easy to identify the commercial sites mostly with slaughter plants and so on,” he said. “Since then, of that 12,000, about 4,000 are new registrations since July 2014, which are essentially our hobby farmers and backyard producers, some of which do have some small little commercial businesses going on.”

Clark told the MPC AGM regionally, the vast majority of those are Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, more specifically Ontario and Quebec. “We’ve seen a real big upsurge in British Columbia. We started with about 18 sites. We’re at about 670. Nova Scotia as well has quite a few hobby farmers, but both Ontario and Quebec were upwards of 4,000 locations,” Clark said. “We do have financial penalties now that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency can issue.”

“That came into effect August of 2016. Most of the infractions would be minor violations, they’d call them, which is a $1300 fine. Now that should never happen in a first offense. Our understanding is CFI inspectors can issue verbal warning first, written letters of noncompliance. Then if there’s a history developed there, they do have the capacity now to issue a fine,” added Clark.

So far, said Clark it’s been mostly educational with some inspectors a little more heavy-handed, not all that compassionate or lenient, and have issued letters of noncompliance for repeat offenders.

“I have heard from the producers in some of those cases, there’s not a lot, but that is what we’ve seen today. There have not been any fines issues in the last nine months since they’ve come into effect,” he said. “We do continue to see an increase in compliance and participation in the program. I suspect people who are reporting some of their movements maybe aren’t doing the farm-to-farm, so there’s still some clean-up we have to do in terms of validation and reaching out to people to encourage them to report more.”

The real purpose of the program is disease response and Clark encourages health officials to use the official system first where they can generate a report in about five minutes and then give them something to start with.

“We’re really trying to see some value added put into our programs, so something new we have is the Ractopamine-free certification program. People can generate their swine movement document right from PigTrace as an electronic document rather than filling out paperwork, so they’re really killing two birds with one stone,” he said. “Other uses of the data itself is really just looking at industry trends, like how many exports do we have from a region. I want to start looking at intra provincial movements, what are some of the trends there. I do know, for example, we have some movements from Saskatchewan to Quebec. So we do have some very long distance movements happening in Canada.”

If there’d be a big disease outbreak in Canada, it’s good to be aware of what the general flows are, even if there are only a few movements each month.

Clark said the big advantage first and foremost, is on the food safety side.

“We have had some issues of food safety requests from the USDA where we can immediately trace the farm that those pigs came from,” he said. “That’s not a disease issue, that’s food safety. We’ve seen some use of the system that way. That’s a great benefit, for we’re exporting live animals to the US. We need to make sure we can respond to requests by the federal government in the US.”

Using the system as an information platform because for the first time there is an information platform that encompasses all of Canada’s pork industry.

“Right now we have all of our sites registered in there from each province, and I’m really working with Canadian Pork Council in the other provinces to build on that,” he said. “We’re already paying for it, so essentially we can do a real low-cost enhancement of our information system to include all of our other programs such as PigSafe and PigCare.” •

— By Harry Siemens