The Canadian Pork Council plans to focus on Canada’s swine breeding herds as it moves to make national-level traceability ear tags available for hog producers’ use.
Producers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan can place orders and the other provinces will come online within the next few days or the next few weeks, CPC traceability program manager Jeff Clark said Friday on the hog industry-sponsored program Farmscape.
“Since most breeding animals have tags already for barn management purposes, we’ve tried to create a tag that can suit those needs as well so it’s a very practical tag,” Clark said.
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The council’s program will offer three types of tags, two being the rectangular-shaped tag and trapezoid-shaped tag, both of which will have the animal’s unique traceability number and space for a barn management number to be custom-printed on the yellow “male” portion. On the “female” portion of those two tags can be a button or a secondary panel in one of six different colours.
The third option is a yellow RFID (radio frequency identification) button.
“One of our key components to developing a traceability program is we want to make it valuable to the producer, not just for fighting disease or potentially getting enhanced market access around the world, but we want to try to create a business tool that can help producers do their business,” Clark said on Farmscape.
The tags, part of the CPC’s PigTrace Canada swine traceability initiative, are eventually to be used to report the movement of individual breeding animals from premises-to-premises.
The tags being made available now for order “will prepare the national breeding herd for these future movement reporting requirements,” the council said on its website.
Canadian hog producers have already registered their premises and adopted a national slaughter tattoo numbering scheme, allowing traceback to a market hog’s last farm of residence before it’s sent to slaughter.
National integration of market hog movement information from packing plants using tattoo numbers provides a reliable, cost-effective method for tracing slaughter movements, the council said.
