Pilot testing of the Canadian pork industry's new pork quality assurance programme is underway on about 75 farms across Canada, including five in Saskatchewan.

Canadian Pork Excellence amalgamates existing quality assurance programmes under one umbrella, including the food safety component under PigSafe, the animal welfare component under PigCare and traceability under PigTrace.

Harvey Wagner, the Manager of Producer Services with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says the changes bring the new programme up to date with current knowledge.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

The old programme was developed in the late 1990s.

We found that maybe how it was originally set up doesn't fit with today's agriculture as well so the Board of Directors at the CPC decided it was time to make some changes after consulting with producers.

They gave the direction that there was some things that maybe needed to be changed given the new understanding.

So we reviewed all of our requirements in the programme and what we're doing and compared that to the new needs and found out there were some areas that were lacking.

In the PigSafe side of it it was primarily training.

There were a few other areas more minor but training was found to be kind of important and maybe somewhat lacking in the past programmes so we're going to have an emphasis on that.

On the PigCare we're incorporating all the requirements in the new code of practice that came out in 2014.

Before, in the old Animal Care Assessment programme there are recommendations but now we're incorporating them so there's a few areas of change there as well.

Mr Wagner says the goal is to have the pilot testing and any adjustments to the programme completed in time to allow industry-wide adoption to begin in January 2018.