Farmscape for October 13, 2005  (Episode 1937)

The Canadian Pork Council says the first validations under its new Animal Care Assessment Tool will begin early in the new year.

The animal care assessment tool was developed as a separate animal welfare component of Canadian Quality Assurance, the swine industry's on farm food safety program, and advance copies are available now.

Provincial CQA Coordinators have received their training and will be training ACA validators over the fall and winter.

National Coordinator Dawn Lawrence notes, while swine producers must be enrolled in CQA to participate in the animal care component, the two validations will remain independent.

Clip-Dawn Lawrence-Canadian Pork Council 

The ACA tool will, for now, have no impact on their food safety validations so even though the validator may do them on the same day they will be separate reports and the outcomes themselves will be completely independent.

If a producer needs to make some adjustments on the animal care side after they've been doing food safety for several years that won't affect their status on the CQA program and it won't affect their ability to ship if that is a requirement of the packer.

We haven't heard anything from any of the packers indicating that they will require it.

The Canadian Pork Council has indicated that there is a view to bringing the two programs under one umbrella.

For example now they are being delivered through the same system so, if producers have questions about animal care, they would talk to their CQA food safety contact but for now the two will be completely independent.

We will look at determining how the two might merge.

The time line is unknown right now but we will be discussing it at the Canadian Pork Council level to determine how that would happen.

Lawrence anticipates a few minor revisions to the program's materials prior to its January launch.

She says, once is officially released, validations can begin.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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