Farmscape for July 21, 2005 (Episode 1865) Officials with the Canadian Pork Council will spend the next few months hammering out the final logistics of merging the newly developed Animal Care Assessment Tool into the existing Canadian Quality Assurance program. The Animal Care Assessment Tool was developed to provide swine producers an auditable method for documenting their animal care procedures and advance copies are available now. It was designed to incorporate into and use the same delivery mechanism as Canadian Quality Assurance, the swine industry's national on farm food safety program. National CQA Coordinator Dawn Lawrence says, over the next few months, officials will evaluate producer impressions of the package and identify any difficulties or problems that need to be addressed. Clip-Dawn Lawrence-Canadian Pork Council The animal care assessment tool will be made available in advance copy from July through to December and we'll begin doing some validations on the program in January. Through the fall we'll be providing some more information to producers and training our validators. The hope is that we can use the same validators for animal care as we've been using for the food safety component of CQA. We need to work out all of the details for exactly how that would happen and see how the two are going to fit together. We'll do that by working with these advance copies and then slowly introducing the two programs to see how we can bring them together. For example, with the food safety component, we have full validations and partial validations and we would need to determine all of the logistics for blending the two different types of validations for food safety and for animal care and keeping things as streamlined as possible for the producers. Lawrence says the hope is that both the food safety and animal care validations, even at these early stages, can take place at the same time. For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane. *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council |