Farmscape for March 1, 2006  (Episode 2075)

Manitoba Pork Council expects to begin circulating premise registration forms to the more than two thousand swine production units across the province by the end of this week.

The Canadian swine industry, as part of its preparation for participation in a national multispecies livestock identification and traceability system, is collecting registration information from all farms that produce swine.

In conjunction with the premise registration, swine farms will also be issued new tattoo numbers.

Manitoba Pork Council emergency preparedness and technical affairs specialist Jeff Clark says, in Manitoba, packages are expected to begin going out within the next few days.

Clip-Jeff Clark-Manitoba Pork Council  

Producers in Manitoba will be receiving the premises registration kit that will be requesting information such as the plot of land on which they farm using the legal land description on their certificate of title and, to clarify, a premise is the actual farm.

We're not so much interested in the actual producer but rather the plot of land, the barn, because that will be central to traceability, to tracking disease movement etceteras etceteras, production information such as types of animals, numbers of animals, manure storage, manure application and then contact information, both the barn owner and also barn workers.

In the event of an emergency authorities will have to get a hold of the owner but they'll also need to get a hold of whoever it might be on farm and, in some cases, those might be different people.

Using the premises we will assign market tattoo numbers that will be specific to each premises.

Clark notes the original goal was to have producers begin using their new tattoo numbers on May 1st but there have been requests to push that back to June 1st.

He adds an effort is being made to coordinate that and have all farms in western Canada switch to the new tattoo numbering system on the same day.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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