Farmscape for September 27, 2005  (Episode 1924)

Officials of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency expect to have a new program ready, by the end of next month, for the training and certification of its federal feed inspectors.

To better protect the integrity of the feed supply the federal government has introduced several measures, including banning the use of ruminant proteins to make ruminant feeds, and it's developing several others including new medicated feed mixing regulations.

To support these changes the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is now in the process of hiring and training approximately 100 new feed inspectors across the country.

CFIA Feed Manufacturing Coordinator Judy Thompson says a certification program will help ensure inspection staff are handling their duties in a consistent manner.

Clip-Judy Thompson-Canadian Food Inspection Agency 

We've been talking about developing a training program for a long time and we've been doing that off the side of our desks but, now that we have some additional resources, we have people dedicated to developing a bunch of different modules so that we can have a certification program for our inspection staff so that we have the confidence that they're all doing everything the same way.

We're looking at developing a bunch of different types of materials and right now we have a contractor working on a couple of e-learning projects, one on inspector safety and one on feed sampling that will be available sometime probably the end of October.

It's a good step for the feed program to get the certification program into place.

It'll help to increase consistency across the country in terms of decision making with respect to inspections and we're hoping that we'll be happy with the results and the industry will be as well.

Thompson says, with respect to the feed ban in particular, the agency had been looking at increasing the number of inspections on farm and changing the frequency of inspections but limited resources didn't allow much flexibility.

She says the additional personnel will allow the agency to do more of the same activities it does now but in more places and more often in some places, if necessary.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council