Farm-Scape, Episode 2125

Swine producers in Saskatchewan are scheduled the make the switch Monday to a new slap tattoo numbering system for keeping track of their hogs.

Effective Monday swine producers in Saskatchewan will become the first in Canada to start using a new slap tattoo number system.

The reworked numbering scheme is designed to integrate into the swine industry component of a national multispecies system for identifying and tracking the movement of livestock in Canada.

Sask Pork policy analyst Mark Ferguson almost all of the producers in Saskatchewan have now been registered under the new system and packages have been mailed out to them.

"In Saskatchewan all tattoos are going to end in the digit 4 and we have asked that all producers start using new tattoos as of May 1st.

The absolute final day for ceasing use any old numbers is going to be May 15th.

The reason we had to do a national tattoo registry was to make the tattoo number a unique number.

Right now there's a lot of duplication across the country in terms of tattoo numbers.

To use that as a building block in a national traceability system, it had to be a unique number and that number had to be linked back to a specific farm, not just a producer or a company but that actual land location.

Now the tattoo is linked to a land location, they are a unique number and that really sets the stage for the entire traceability system."

Ferguson says the next step in developing the wine industry component of new national ID and tracing system will be the creation of a western slaughter database where data from federally inspected packing plants in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta will be collected and stored.

He notes, once that database is operational, it'll provide the ability to have instant traceability of swine from the finishing barn to the slaughter plant.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

Farm-Scape is sponsored by Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork.