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

Harvey Wagner, the manager of Producer Services with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says the pilot project started a month or so ago, the last farm participating in the pilot received its programme binder last week and the first farm went through its trial audit last week.

Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board

We hope to have them all finished by the end of March so that the farms can go through their validation audit.

After that we'll compile what we've found.

That will be sent back to the working committee at the Canadian Pork Council, we'll review what needs to be done, make the changes over the summer and then hopefully everything will go to publication this fall, ready to be adopted on our first farms starting January 2018.

It's kind of an exciting process to get this done.

The pork industry across Canada has been working on this quite a bit for the last two years and now we're getting to the point of actually getting it onto the farm and it's quite an exciting process.

We're looking forward to see how the programme is going to actually going to work.

It, at first blush, looks fairly complicated but I think when people get into it they find that it's maybe not quite as difficult as it might appear so we're hopeful that it's going to address the needs and provide a high quality food safety and animal care monitoring for our producers and our customers for the next decade.

Mr Wagner applauds the participating operations that will work through the binder, make the necessary management changes, go through the validation and then provide feedback on what they feel could be changed to make the programme stronger.