Farm-Scape, Episode 2159

Manitoba Pork Council reports a shortage of slap tattoo numbering equipment has forced a delay in the final switch to a new national tattoo numbering system for swine.

As part of a national effort to develop a multispecies livestock identification and tracking system the Canadian swine industry is in the process of allocating new slap tattoo numbers.

Producers in Saskatchewan began switching to the new numbers May 1st and producers in the rest Canada had been scheduled to follow suit between June 1st and June 15th.

Manitoba Pork Council emergency response specialist Jeff Clark says that deadline has been pushed back. Producers who have submitted to council their farm premises registration forms have been receiving their new tattoo numbers in the past week or so and still getting a few late submissions coming in. Only producers who have submitted their farm premises forms will receive those new numbers.

That being said we had an original deadline of June 15th for the change over of the new tattoo numbers. That's being pushed back now to July 1st due to a national shortage of supply of numbers and tattoo equipment across Canada. Primarily in Manitoba we're short with eights.

Producers can keep their old numbers, but just adding on an eight to the end so there's been a high demand for eights here in Manitoba, a few people getting hammers and other numbers as well. A number of producers have their orders in. They're just on back order so they should be receiving them by mid towards late June and we're still targeting an implementation date of July 1st at the plants.

Under the new system each tattoo number is allocated to a specific farm premises according to the operation's legal land description on the certificate of title and, to accommodate different book keeping methods, an individual premise may be allocated multiple numbers.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.