Livestock producers who have not already applied for premise identification numbers for sites on which they have livestock are being encouraged to do so in anticipation of changes to sections of Canada's Health of Animals regulations pertaining to animal identification and traceability which will extend mandatory movement reporting to producers of cattle, bison, sheep, goats and farmed elk.

Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says the pork industry, for which mandatory movement reporting already exists, is way out in front in terms of registering premises.

Jeff Clark-PigTrace Canada

We have around 13 thousand, just over 13 thousand pig premises registered.

That could be anywhere from a hobby farm having one or two pigs up to a large commercial farm, assembly yard, auction, abattoir and we've grown.

When we started back in 2006, 2007 and even up to 2012 we really worked to get our commercial operations registered and at that point we were at about eight thousand.

Those additional five thousand pig premises that we have registered are hobby farms and people that we previously didn't know about and that continues to grow.

That's 13 thousand locations in Canada, pig locations have a premises ID number so the pork sector is way ahead in terms of getting premises IDs for people that have pigs.

I don't know how many more are out there, people that have anywhere from two to 20 pigs but we continue to register them almost daily.

Mr Clark says it's a moving target in terms of bringing on new people who have never heard about the programme who want to slaughter pigs and to get booked in they have to have a premise identification number so they can buy ear tags.