The mandatory reporting of swine movements under the Health of Animals Act for swine traceability came into effect on 1 July 2014 for commercial farms, was expanded one year later to include farmed wild boar and hobby farms with pigs and requires both the shipper and receiver to report animal movements to the PigTrace Canada database.

Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, reports well over 12,000 premises have now been registered.

Jeff Clark-PigTrace Canada

The requirements are that movement data, the source, destination sites be reported to PigTrace both at move out and move in.

People have seven days to report that information.

Also part of that would be the vehicle license plate and the number of pigs as well as any animal identification that's required such as for shipping to slaughter or to an auction facility.

The vast majority of premises registered are farms.

We've had upwards of 12,100 total premises across Canada, so that's rendering facilities, auctions, assembly yards, abattoirs but the vast majority are farms.

When we first started it was easy to identify the commercial sites, mostly the slaughter plants and so on.

Since then, of the that 12,000, about 4,000 are new registrations since July 2014 which are essentially our hobby farmers and backyard producers, some of which do have some small commercial business going on.

Regionally the vast majority of those are Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, really Ontario, Quebec.

We've seen a real big upsurge in British Columbia.

We started with about 18 sites.

We're at about 670.

Nova Scotia as well has quite a few hobby farmers but both Ontario, Quebec we're upwards of 4,000 locations.

Mr Clark says over the past year about 700,000 movements have been reported and numbers continue to increase.