PigTrace, the National Swine Traceability Program will be among the topics discussed as part of the Canadian Institute of Food Science and Technology and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada biennial joint conference Monday and Tuesday in Winnipeg.

Jeff Clark, the manager of the Canadian Pork Council's national traceability programme, says as part of a pilot project planned for this summer program staff will be working with several of the software development companies that provide swine production management software to modify their products to collect traceability information.

Jeff Clark – Canadian Pork Council

The basic information that we're after is when you're moving pigs from one site to another we want to know the date and time that they're loaded, the license plate of the trailer that they're going on, the farm you're at and the farm you're moving them to.

Then for those who are receiving pigs the same information except on the receiver's end, so the date and time your received them, the number of pigs that came in.

That's the basic information.

If there's individual tag numbers on animals, which shouldn't happen very often, but those tag numbers will have to be captured as well.

That's where the ban management software comes in nicely because most barn managers will capture that information anyway for their own records in that barn management software.

If we can pull that information out of the software products producers don't have to do anything.

They don't even have to think to do it.

The software can actually be programmed to do it automatically that then end of the day if that's what the producer wants.

From our end it's just low impact on the producer.

We're not creating extra work and that'll help us a long ways toward implementing the programme.

Mr Clark says by modifying the software producers use every day, it will be relatively simple to forward traceability information to a national database through an internet connection.