Farmscape for June 10, 2015

The chair of Sask Pork says Saskatchewan's new Premises Identification Database offers pork producers another tool in the effort to prevent or reduce the impact of disease on the province's swine herd.
The federal and provincial governments have officially launched the new online Saskatchewan Premises Identification Database.
The program links livestock and poultry to specific land locations, and along with animal identification and animal movement reporting, makes up Canada's livestock traceability system.
Florian Possberg, the chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says we've become much more international in terms of where animals move.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
The goal is to have every movement of animals between destinations be tracked.
In the case of the hog industry, if we're moving animals from breeder unit to nursery, from nursery to finishing, from finishing to market, all those movements are tracked.
By tracking those movements, if there's an issue with disease and using the worst case scenario, if we had a hoof and mouth disease outbreak for example, you can go back and find the source farm by exact location.
You can also trace out and find out what animals from those premises had contact with other premises that could be susceptible to the same sort of disease, so it gives you really the ability to trace forward and trace back as to where problematic animals have went.

Possberg says today we're producing animals and moving them to different provinces, and in some cases, out of country for further growth or processing, and from there the food can end up around the globe, so knowing where that food came from, in terms of disease control and other things, is a much bigger challenge, but with the sophisticated electronics we have now, we've brought tracing animal movement back to something that's very manageable.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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