Saskatchewan’s new livestock monitoring and disease surveillance program will do more than keep customers happy, says the province’s agriculture minister – it will also keep the industry happy.
Dwain Lingenfelter said safety-conscious consumers of the future will demand stricter protection and regulations. He predicted consumers will want to scan a package of meat and find out where it was slaughtered, which farm it came from and the health status of the herd or the individual animal.
“If that is where the consumer is going and one jurisdiction is able to provide that kind of background on the status of the product and other jurisdictions don’t, we will continue to be on the cutting edge of that technology.”
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Monitoring will cover three areas: animal bacteria that have human health implications; diseases that limit production; and diseases that limit trade.
The program aims to undertake on-farm testing and develop control procedures for diseases like Johne’s disease, chronic wasting disease, equine infectious anemia and bovine viral diarrhea.
Louise Greenberg, Saskatchewan Agriculture director of inspection and regulatory management, said the program is voluntary and free.
“We’re going to be going out to the farms, or we’ll arrange to have the samples collected on the farm and they will be sent in for analysis,” she said.
“We’re not having any cost to producers. We have to start to provide the momentum and to show the positive results that can happen.”
Collected data will be confidential. Statistics will be provincial, not individual or regional, Greenberg said.
The laboratory analysis will be done by Prairie Diagnostic Services, which has labs in Regina and Saskatoon.
The province has allocated $600,000 this year to pay for the program. Greenberg said most of that will pay for lab work and information collection.
The program will complement on-farm food safety programs, she added. Those programs look at management, she said, while this program strictly deals with disease issues.
The agriculture department will be meeting with the various commodity groups to design programs specifically for their needs.
Saskatchewan’s meat processing industry is the largest component of the province’s growing food processing industry.
Meat exports pumped $2.1 billion into the gross domestic product last year.
