Canadian Pork Excellence is a new platform of programs or suite of applications that the Canadian Pork Council has launched incorporating traceability, food safety on-farm, and animal care. This suite of programs includes the existing PigTrace Canada and will consist of PigSAFE and PigCARE Canada which CP will launch soon.

Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork updated the industry on these programs at the 2018 Manitoba Swine Seminar. “We’ve gone through over two years’ worth of development on drafts so far for the PigSAFE and PigCARE programs,” said Fynn.

“We’ve done a thorough review of what currently exists for those on-farm assurance programs, the CQA and ACA, and wanted to make sure that we incorporated the new market expectations and whatnot into those. And so we went through a period of test piloting those programs on-farm in early 2017. We did 15 farms in Manitoba and 73 farms across Canada to get feedback from producers to incorporate into the drafts.”

They’ve done another stage of revisions and program development, to where they have a second draft. And that’s about to go through another committee of producers to take a second look at it and hopefully approve the programs for release next year. It was time to do a thorough review of the food safety on-farm programs. “We’ve had CQA and ACA programs in place; CQA’s for almost 20 years and the ACA program for about 10. The Board of Directors recognized all producers with Canadian Pork Council it was time for the review,” he said.

“We had the release of the new 2014 Code of Practice for the Care of Handing Pigs that includes some set requirements, and we need to make sure they are part of our assurance programs. And so we thought it was time to do a thorough review and relaunch the programs with new branding and that sort of thing, ” added Fynn

With all these changes and costing farmers more money to implement what are some of the opportunities, they will provide those same producers.

“A big reason for updating the programs is to make sure that we’re continuing to meet the market expectations, and then also meet the expectations of a Canadian public,” said Fynn. “We want to make sure public sentiment is on the side of pork producers, and that helps us continue our support from government and whatnot. And our markets, we have a variety of markets. We export a lot of product. We sell a lot of product on a domestic market too. There are expectations for that product to meet food safety and animal care standards, and we want to make sure that’s incorporated into the programs.”

The Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork said recently Canadian Pork Council, and Canada Pork have developed a Verified Canadian Pork branding logo, and that logo in itself incorporates traceability, food safety, and animal care.

“The pillars that hold up that branding are these new programs, PigSAFE, PigCARE, and PigTrace,” he said. “Through developing these programs, we make sure we have the foundation around that Verified Canadian Pork so that when that logo gets put on our pork products, people know what to expect of it and understand that it meets a certain standard. The markets that we sell into, there are some premium markets, and they look at those things very seriously.”

Fynn said it’s important to note customers view the existing food safety program, the CQA, and existing animal care program, ACA as having a high standard to the industry’s markets already.

“All of our marketers talking about these new programs and the new branding say the international markets are receiving them very well,” he said. “A lot of those international markets look upon Canadian pork as the safest pork in the world, and we want to keep that up, while also emphasizing how good our animal care standards are on-farm as well while meeting that need for safe pork that goes on consumers’ plates.”

Fynn said PigSAFE and PigCARE would be available to producers this summer to join the suite of programs expects that any producers that are going through their full on-farm assessment come January 1, 2019, would join the new suite of programs. “

I need to emphasize that those that aren’t joining right away will still be on the CQA and ACA, which is still held up to a new standard, but it gives us a three-year transition period for all farms to adopt the new programs fully,” he said. Fynn thanked all the producers for the input and contributions providing feedback helping create programs that have high standards to help meet the market demand practical to implement on-farm. •

— By Harry Siemens