Farmscape for June 20, 2017

The Manager of Producer Services with Sask Pork says final adjustments to the new Canadian Pork Excellence Program are now in the works.
Pilot testing the Canadian Pork Council's Canadian Pork Excellence Program, the Canadian pork industry's new on farm food safety and animal care assurance program, has now been completed and officials are evaluating feedback from producers and validators who participated.
Harvey Wagner, the Manager of Producers Services with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, notes the was a few things that participants found were difficult.

Clip-Harvey Wagner-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
There's an emphasis in the new CPE, on the PigCare and the PigSafe, to have more training done for people working in the facilities, in the barns, to make sure that they know what they're looking for and how to actually do some of the tasks and record some of the tasks that they're doing.
That was probably the biggest challenge because there's requirements in the program for training although we're still right now working on some of the training modules so there was a bit of a gap there.
It definitely helped inform the group that's working on the training process what needs and what they'd like to see.
There's some other smaller issues on the food safety side and there's a few other small things.
Learning a new format is always a challenge too because the format of the program is a little different.
Once people get into it though they seem to get it so, for the most part, it's been not too bad although there's always anxiety when you have a new program and change is always a challenge so we'll have to be working through that.

Wagner says the animal care and food safety technical groups are now evaluating the feedback and will make any final adjustments prior to approval of the program by the Canadian Pork Council Board of Directors and ultimately implementation.
He says that's expected to begin in 2018.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork