A new animal welfare component will be added to the national pork quality assurance program next year.
The Canadian Pork Council will launch its animal care assessment program in January as part of a larger food safety program. Sarah Turner of Alberta Quality Pork said it will start out as a voluntary program and become mandatory in 2008.
“At this point in time producers can’t sell to Olymel or Maple Leaf or some of the other large federally inspected plants without CQA (Canadian Quality Assurance) recognition,” she said.
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The animal care program will be implemented gradually to give farmers a chance to make changes before it becomes mandatory. It will apply to hogs in confined production and outdoor pigs.
Producers received their first glimpse of the program last summer and some farms have tried it as a pilot project.
“A lot of the requirements that are in it, producers are doing a lot of this anyhow. This is just formally documenting it,” Turner said.
The program covers housing, humane animal handling, pig comfort, feed and water supplies, staff training and stocking densities that are appropriate for all weights of animals. It also deals with how downers are treated and how euthanasia should be done.
“One of the biggest challenges we have are older barns that were built for a sow that produced less numbers of pigs per year and those pigs are being marketed at a lower weight,” Turner said.
“Now we have higher producing sows and larger market weights so there could be potentially stocking density issues that need to be addressed.”
The program is partly linked to market demand. Fast food restaurant chains such as Wendy’s and McDonalds as well as retailers such as Safeway already inspect processing plants and want to know what is happening on the farm. International customers also request such certification.
“The CQA program has become very prominent in the overseas campaigns that are going on in the Japanese marketplace as one of the quality attributes of Canadian pork,” Turner said.
