The Canadian Pork Council is engaged in pilot testing on over 80 farms across Canada of the PigSafe and PigCare components of Canadian Pork Excellence, the Canadian pork industry's new on farm food safety and animal care assurance programme.

Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programmes with Manitoba Pork, told those on hand earlier this month for Manitoba Pork's Annual General Meeting the goal is to make sure the programme is as up to date on new research, new expectations and new technologies as possible when it comes to food safety and, on the animal care side of things, that the programme incorporates public expectations laid out in the Code of Practice delivered in 2014.

Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork

We're putting a lot more emphasis on training in the new programme to make sure that programme expectations are really well understood and that they're understood from the barn manager level all the way down to staff that are implementing those expectations.

On the food safety side of things there's a few new improvements that are being made to the programme in the draft phase and on the animal care side we're incorporating the Code of Practice requirements in there and making sure that we're assessing on all those Code of Practice requirements.

One of the major things that we're doing on that side of things is we're making sure that the validators, who are usually veterinarians, are really looking at the animals and providing feedback to the producers on those animals and making sure that everything is in good condition.

It's one of those situations where the proof is in the pudding.

If the animals look good, usually there's really good management on farm.

Mr Fynn says the pilot project will wrap up in May and feedback will be collected to see what producers and validators liked about the programme, where they see room for improvement and suggestions then final revisions will be made and the programme will hopefully be rolled out this fall.