David Bennett received the transplant on Jan 7.

His condition began deteriorating several days ago, the hospital said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that Bennett was given “compassionate palliative care” after it became clear that he would not recover.

Bennett was able to communicate with his family during his final hours, the hospital said.

Bennett first came to UMMC as a patient in October and was placed on a heart-lung bypass machine to keep him alive, but he was deemed ineligible for a conventional heart transplant.

After Bennett was implanted with a pig heart that had been genetically modified to prevent rejection in a first-of-its-kind surgery, his son called the procedure “a miracle.”

The surgery, performed by a team at the hospital, was among the first to demonstrate the feasibility of a pig-to-human heart transplant, a field made possible by new gene editing tools.

For Bennett, the procedure was his last option.

“Before consenting to receive the transplant, Mr. Bennett was fully informed of the procedure’s risks, and that the procedure was experimental with unknown risks and benefits,” the hospital said.

On Dec. 31, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency authorization for the surgery in the hope of saving his life.

The transplanted heart performed “very well for several weeks without any signs of rejection,” the hospital said on Wednesday.

Pigs have long been a tantalizing source of potential transplants because their organs are so similar to humans.

Prior efforts at pig-to-human transplants had failed because of genetic differences that caused organ rejection or viruses that posed an infection risk.

— Reporting for Reuters by Kanishka Singh in Bangalore.

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Jenelle Hamblin, manager of swine health programs with the Manitoba Pork Council, confirmed that an operation near Notre Dame de Lourdes has tested positive for PEDv.

Why it matters: Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) is generally fatal to younger piglets and causes severe dehydration, and has now been found far farther west than ever before.

Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Office (CVO) said only that a finisher barn “in southwestern Manitoba” had been confirmed with the virus June 24.

“The CVO is working closely with the owners, the private veterinarian and the Manitoba Pork Council to determine the source,” the department said in an email.

The case extends this year’s outbreak far west of the Red River — the virus’s typical western border — although two cases of PEDv were reported just west of the Red River in 2017.

Six cases had been reported west of the Red River as of June 24 this year, including barns in the Lowe Farm area, itself a western record at the time for the virus in the province. The province now says that five barns in south-central Manitoba are infected, as well as the westernmost case recently confirmed.

The virus has also spread to the north. Two barns in northeast Manitoba have tested positive for PEDv, the first time that region has reported infections. The virus has typically been found in southeastern Manitoba, with barns in the Steinbach and eastern Red River Valley area forming the bulk of cases during 2017’s historic outbreak, which reached 80 cases by the end of that year.

PEDv case numbers have now risen past levels seen at this time in 2017. A total 41 cases had been reported by the end of June 2017, compared to 44 as of June 24 this year.

Hamblin expressed concern when the first cases in south-central Manitoba were reported this year, concern heightened by the mystery of those infections. Cases that hopped the Red River in 2017 were attributed to direct animal movement, while the cause of the infection in south-central Manitoba this year was unknown.

“Manitoba Pork is encouraging producers and service providers to continue to follow the highest standards of bio­security,” Hamblin said in an emailed statement, noting that the CVO is still investigating the cause of infection near Notre Dame de Lourdes.

Experts say they are still working to pinpoint how the virus is spreading.

The new infections take this year’s outbreak out of the area most utilized by the pork council’s self-described best tool for prevention.

The council launched the Manitoba Co-ordinated Disease Response platform in 2017 in light of PEDv. The online sharing platform was originally targeted at producers in the southeast and has since been credited for the quick dissemination of outbreak and biosecurity information. At last count, almost 80 per cent of farmers in the southeast had signed on with the program. Province-wide, however, that number drops to just over half, despite efforts by the pork council to promote the program.

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Brandishing a paintbrush in her snout, Pigcasso enthusiastically tosses her head to create bright, bold strokes across a canvas propped up in her sty.

The sow was rescued from an abattoir as a piglet and brought to an animal sanctuary in Franschhoek, in South Africa’s Western Cape region in 2016, where her new owners noticed her love of colour and paintbrushes.

“Pigs are very smart animals and so when I brought Pigcasso here to the barn, I thought how do I keep her entertained?” said Joanne Lefson, who runs Farm Sanctuary SA.

“We threw in some soccer balls, rugby balls and of course there were some paintbrushes lying around because the barn was newly built… She basically ate or destroyed everything except these paintbrushes… she loved them so much,” Lefson added.

Soon the pig was dipping the brushes into pots of paint and making her mark. Her paintings can sell for almost US$4,000, with the proceeds going to animal welfare. She has even had one of her artworks turned into a watch face for Swiss watchmaker Swatch.

Swatch announced a collaboration with the pig last month.

The limited edition “Flying Pig by Ms. Pigcasso,” features green, blue and pink brush strokes and sells for US$120.

“Pigcasso is definitely an abstract expressionist, you can’t exactly define what she’s painting but I can tell you that her style slightly changes depending on her mood like any great artist,” said Lefson.

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Global swine genetics company Topigs Norsvin has officially opened the doors to Delta Canada, a boar genetics and research facility located northwest of Winnipeg near Woodlands.

The company, which markets itself as the second-largest swine genetic company globally, opened the $15-million facility June 27 and aims to deliver its first boars by year’s end.

“Delta Canada will substantially increase the genetic progress in our Z-line (dam line) and TN Tempo,” CTO Hans Olijslagers said in a recent release. “It is part of Topigs Norsvin’s long-term breeding strategy and will substantially contribute to our target of doubling genetic progress in the coming period.”

The company has tagged resilience, quick growth, meat quality and proportion of live-born piglets among the traits of the TN Tempo sire line, which they market as “ideal” for restricted or liquid feeding.

The site northwest of Winnipeg was chosen for its distance from other hog production, an element tied to the facility’s biosecurity, while still within easy distance of Winnipeg’s Richardson International Airport, something the company says will support international exports.

The Manitoba Pork Council welcomed the addition to its sector.

“The significance of this development is that it brings an international genetics company to make a major investment, as a company, here in Manitoba,” general manager Andrew Dickson said. “The signal that it sends to other swine genetics companies is that Manitoba is a place you can do business in and it’s a good location in order to build your North American, or, in this case, hemisphere, business.”

Dickson says he expects the facility to add more competition to the existing Manitoba hog genetics market. There are about four or five companies currently represented in the province, he said.

In particular, the council singled out the facility’s CT scanner, on-site truck wash and secure supply barns.

“As an industry, there’s been more science brought to bear to improve production and, by that, we mean that there are techniques used within, say, the medical field that now have been brought to bear to improve the selection of animals for breeding purposes,” Dickson said.

The ability to scan the whole animal, rather than being limited to current techniques, such as back-fat probing, is expected to help select, “different features for different markets,” according to Dickson.

“Some markets require a very lean animal. Some require animals with some more back fat on them than perhaps we might be used to. Some are looking for animals with very large loin areas. Others are looking for smaller loin areas,” he said. “The intent is to try and select, on the male side, for genetics that will give them a variety of options for different types of pigs for different market places across the world.”

The company says the scanner and IFIR feed stations will give a better measure of carcass and pork quality, individual feed intake data rather than extrapolating feed from growth and back fat, previously unavailable organ imaging for animal health, video analysis of behaviour and welfare and genetic selection based on genomics, rather than pedigree.

Topigs Norsvin says Delta Canada will take 2,600 pigs and will see 7,500 nucleus boars tested annually.

The post Manitoba cuts the ribbon on blueblood boar genetics appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Privately owned agricultural company Guangxi Yangxiang Co. Ltd. is running two seven-floor sow-breeding operations, and is putting up four more, including one with as many as 13 floors that will be the world’s tallest building of its kind.

Hog farms of two or three floors have been tried in Europe. Some are still operating, others have been abandoned, but few new ones have been built in recent years, because of management difficulties and public resistance to large, intensive farms.

Now, as China pushes ahead with industrialization of the world’s largest hog herd, part of a 30-year effort to modernize its farm sector and create wealth in rural areas, companies are experimenting with high-rise housing for pigs despite the costs. The “hotels” show how far some breeders are willing to go as China overhauls its farming model.

“There are big advantages to a high-rise building,” said Xu Jiajing, manager of Yangxiang’s mountain-top farm.

“It saves energy and resources. The land area is not that much but you can raise a lot of pigs.”

Companies like Yangxiang are pumping more money into the buildings — about 30 per cent more than on single-storey modern farms — even as hog prices in China hold at an eight-year low.

For some, the investments are too risky. Besides low prices that have smaller operations culling sows or rethinking expansion plans, there is worry about diseases spreading through such intensive operations.

But success for high-rise pig farms in China could have implications across densely populated, land-scarce Asia, as well as for equipment suppliers.

“We see an increasing demand for two- or three-level buildings,” said Peter van Issum, managing director of Microfan, a Dutch supplier that designed Yangxiang’s ventilation system.

Microfan also supplied a three-storey breeding operation, Daedeok JongDon GGP Farm, in South Korea.

“The higher ones are still an exception, but the future might change rapidly,” van Issum said.

High-rise hogs

Yaji Mountain seems an unlikely location for a huge breeding farm. Up a narrow road, away from villages, massive concrete pig buildings overlook a valley of dense forest that Yangxiang plans to develop as a tourist attraction.

The site, however, is relatively close to Guigang, a city with a river port and waterway connections to the Pearl River Delta, one of the world’s most densely populated regions.

While Beijing is encouraging more livestock production in China’s grain basket in the northeast, many worry that farms there will struggle to get fresh pork safely to big cities thousands of miles away.

That has helped push some farm investments to southern provinces like Guangxi and Fujian, where land is hilly but much closer to many of China’s biggest cities.

Yangxiang will house 30,000 sows on its 11-hectare site by year-end, producing as many as 840,000 piglets annually. That will likely make it the biggest, most intensive breeding farm globally. A more typical large breeding farm in northern China would have 8,000 sows on around 13 hectares.

In Fujian province, Shenzhen Jinxinnong Technology Co. Ltd. also plans to invest 150 million yuan (US$24 million) in two five-storey sow farms in Nanping. Two other companies are building high-rise hog farms in Fujian as well, according to an equipment firm involved in the projects.

Thai livestock-to-retail conglomerate CP Foods is also building four six-storey pig units with local firm Zhejiang Huatong Meat Products Co. in Yiwu, a Chinese city near the large populations around Shanghai.

High-tech complexity

Yangxiang spent 16,000 yuan per sow on its new farm, about 500 million yuan total, not including the cost of the pigs. Building upwards means higher costs and greater complexity, such as for piping feed into buildings, said Xue Shiwei, vice-chief operations officer at Pipestone Livestock Technology Consultancy, a Chinese unit of a U.S. farm management company.

“It would save on land but increase the complexity of the structure, and costs for concrete or steel would be higher,” he said.

Health concerns also raise costs, because the risk of rampant disease — an ever-present problem in China’s livestock sector — is higher with more animals under one roof.

Even two-storey farms in Europe have sparked worries that pigs will receive less care, said Irene Camerlink, an animal welfare expert at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna who has worked with Chinese farms.

Any outbreak of disease could lead to extensive culling, she said.

Farm manager Xu said Yangxiang reduces the risk of disease by managing each floor separately, with staff working on the same floor every day. New sows are introduced to a building on the top floor, and are then moved by elevator to an assigned level, where they remain.

The ventilation system is designed to prevent air from circulating between floors or to other buildings. Air enters through ground channels and passes through ventilation ducts on each level. The ducts are connected to a central exhaust on the roof, with powerful extraction fans pulling the air through filters and pushing it out of 15-metre-high chimneys.

A waste treatment plant is still under construction on Yaji Mountain to handle the site’s manure. After treatment, the liquid will be sprayed on the surrounding forest, and solids sold to nearby farms as organic fertilizer.

The project’s additional equipment — much of it imported — to reduce disease, environmental impact and labour costs, significantly increased Yangxiang’s spending, the company said.

But after testing other models, Yangxiang concluded the multi-storey building was best. Others are less convinced.

“We need time to see if this model is doable,” said Xue of the farm management firm, adding that he would not encourage clients to opt for “hog hotels.”

“There will be many new, competing ideas (about how to raise pigs in China),” Xue said, including high-rise farms.

Eventually, “a suitable model will emerge.”

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Candido Pomar, of Agri­culture and Agri-Food Canada, was set to bring his pig-specific feeder to commercial trials in 2016 at Prairie Swine Centre, the Manitoba Co-operator reported in mid-2015. Since then, however, he says there has been little industry movement.

“The research is going on very nicely,” he said. “We are improving the system… new concepts and so on. This part is going quite well.”

It’s the technology transfer to industry Pomar describes as “… going very slowly.” They’ve had a hard time convincing feeder manufacturers to take the pro­ject on.

The research aims to cut out extra feed cost and reduce the amount of manure in Canada’s hog barns by tailor mixing feed for each pig, based on a history of feeding habits and growth. In 2015, the project promised to lower feed costs by 10 to 15 per cent without lowering carcass performance or size.

Overfeeding

Farmers feed to the highest common denominator, Pomar said, a method that ensures that no pigs are underfed since the herd’s heaviest feed users set the standard, but also overfeeds other pigs.

His research, out of AAFC’s Sher­brooke Research and Develop­­ment Centre, uses a computer model to collect information on body condition, weight gains and growth and feed intake to determine the most efficient feed amount and quality for each individual pig.

Each animal is marked by an electronic chip implanted in the ear. The feeder is then able to identify each animal approaching the feeder and dispense the right amount and mix of feed.

Feed data is taken from the feeders themselves, while several scale configurations are being considered to track the pig’s progress, including a scale in front of the feeder to weigh the pig as it feeds, or a scale that animals must pass over to reach the feeder, Pomar said.

Automatic systems would take daily weight measurements, although the researcher argues that once a week should be enough for commercial operations.

The system is not yet sophisticated enough to measure individual ingredients, but combines two feed mixes, a low-nutrient mix and a higher-nutrient mix, which includes higher soybean protein, minerals and vitamins.

“What we call the ‘rich’ feed is similar to a feed that the industry formulates for young pigs at the beginning of the growing period, so around 20-20 kilograms,” Pomar said.

Pomar estimates his system will save producers $8 per pig in feed, equating to 23 kilograms of soybean meal and 0.6 kilogram of phosphate over the growth period.

More efficient feed also leads to less manure that must be stored or spread, the project argues. Trials have shown up to 40 per cent less nitrogen excreted and Pomar expects a similar 25-30 per cent drop in phosphorus.

For Manitoba’s hog industry, which has taken both regulatory and public opinion hits based on nutrient load in Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba, those numbers may spark interest.

The Manitoba Pork Council said only that precision feeding is still in its early phases and that there are “some glitches being worked out,” according to a spokesperson.

Production delays

Pomar has yet to confirm a manufacturer for the feeder, but change to the industry may be another hurdle, since the feeders would require farms to shift feed compositions and overcome logistical problems.

“The industry would need not just to buy the feeders. It will need also to find the optimal way to use all these feeding approaches,” Pomar said. “It’s not just adding something to what it is doing. It is going to have to change the way it is feeding pigs.”

So far, there has been little interest in bringing the feeder to market in Canada, Pomar said, although his research has gained more traction in Europe. Pomar says three European companies have shown interest and he expects them to start applying his concepts by as early as next year.

“I think we need to make an effort here in Canada to further develop this approach and especially in applying this technology in commercial farms,” he said. “Otherwise, we are going to see other countries applying this concept before us and I think that we are going to be able, with this approach, to be able to improve the economics of production, but also, I think, in terms of environmental impact, this might be improved. I think there’s a clear interest and I’m quite sure that in five to 10 years, this technology is going to be applied somewhere.”

Crossover from dairy

Individualized feed is old news for the dairy industry, where a concept similar to Pomar’s has been on the market for at least a decade. The technology appeared alongside robotic milking, something that has since become common.

“The robots are able to identify, of course, the cow and how much milk it’s producing and puts the appropriate amount of feed in front of the cow and gives the cow access to the robot to be milked based on their productions,” Bruce Grewar of the Dairy Farmers of Manitoba said.

Nico Vos, president of the Tristar Dairy Centre in Grunthal, is among those to sell precision dairy feeders. Like Pomar’s feeder, each animal is fitted with a transponder (as a collar rather than an implant). Information can then be taken on feeding habits, animal health, lactation cycle and milk production.

“We feed the cows according to milk production, so if you have a really high-producing cow, in order to maintain its body condition, again, we have to feed more grain and additives to that cow,” he said. “She breeds a lot easier and gets pregnant a lot easier.”

The equipment takes a significant chunk out of feed costs, Vos said. Also, like Pomar, experts have argued that the technology can be used to better monitor animal health.

Currently, Vos said equipment measures bulk milk output rather than fat content or other quality considerations.

“It’s fairly basic yet,” he said.

What’s the cost?

Without industry partners, it is hard to say how much a precision pig feeder will cost the average farmer or how long it will take for efficiencies to offset equipment cost. Precision feeders in Europe cost well into the thousands of dollars, Pomar said, targeted for niche research use rather than the commercial product he expects to eventually see.

“For commercial purposes, I expect that the feeder itself should be much, much lower than that, but we don’t have it, so I don’t know how much it may cost,” he said. “That’s maybe the difficulty today.”

Some benefits, however, may not appear in a straight cost analysis, he added.

The technology might offer an early warning signal for disease, something that’s been of particular concern in Manitoba this year with the most recent PEDv outbreak in the southeastern part of the province.

“For me, I think it’s going to be an instant reduction of feed cost, but we are going to see also important benefits on having the information about what each pig is doing every day,” Pomar said. “A pig that is getting sick, that is going to change his pattern of feed intake.”

That same data may translate into better planning, including forecast performance to plan transport and slaughter, as well as less time spent monitoring herds, he added.

The post Precision pig feeder faces market delays appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

That means that swine nutritionists and academics are challenged to think about what level of proof is needed for changes to be implemented in the barn.

That is one of the conundrums facing swine nutrition, says John Patience, a professor in the department of animal science at Iowa State University. Patience was raised in Ontario, completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Guelph and was a research leader at the Prairie Swine Centre before moving to the United States. He was the presenter of the Kees de Lange Memorial Lecture at the university’s Swine Research Day held recently in Guelph, Ont.

De Lange was a well-respected swine nutritionist who died in August 2016. Patience called him the “global thought leader in swine nutrition.”

The university also announced at the research day that a scholarship will be created in de Lange’s name.

The manual gets longer

Kees de Lange’s work in fact shows how much has been learned in swine nutrition over the past 50 years. The National Research Council (NRC) based in the United States sets the global standard for animal nutrition with its guidelines, which are the manual for livestock nutrition. The first one in the 1960s was about 80 pages. The latest update, led by de Lange in 2012, was more than 400 pages.

“It needed greater detail because fundamentally that was the level the industry was operating at,” says Patience.

Despite those 400 pages, Patience says there are significant limitations to what nutritionists can do, and the future of nutrition will be to overcome these challenges:

• Feed mills are based on high throughput, especially those in the U.S. Midwest. Patience says a nutritionist might have a great idea to save $2 per hog, but there may be no way to get that ration change through a feed mill.
• Nutritionists need better information about what is going on in barns in real time. With tight biosecurity and farmer concern about information sharing, it is difficult to have the information to make nutritional changes quickly on farms.
• Energy systems have significant practical and technical limitations. Digestibility requirements change with age. Net energy is a measure used in feed formulation, but it can be calculated in several ways.
• Pigs vary greatly in their biological capacity, and nutritional models have challenges taking that into consideration. Does a ration aim at the average, the top, or the bottom performers?
• Academics define successful experiments by their repeatability. How much can the results be trusted? Academics talk about P-Value, and an experiment with a lower P-Value than 0.05 is usually considered not repeatable enough. However, Patience says he’s had to challenge his own assumptions about repeatability in the real world of hog production in Iowa. A P-Value of 0.02 means something will still be right four out of five times.

“If the payback is in dollars per pig, I can’t ignore it,” says Patience. If an employee tells their boss they can save $1 to $2 per pig, and the repeatability is four out of five, the boss will want to know why they shouldn’t do it.

Ten cents per pig saving is worth a lot of money to farms selling hundreds of thousands of pigs per year, he says.

• The rapid growth of feed additives makes for more decisions by nutritionists, some that have to be made with scant research available. As the use of antibiotics for growth promotion becomes limited, the need for understanding novel additives will be increasingly important.
• Improving feed efficiency means pigs that need to use less energy for maintenance. As unhealthy pigs need more energy to fight infection, the value of maintaining a healthy herd will only increase in the future, when less energy goes to maintenance.

The post Still a lot to learn about hog nutrition appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Speaking to producers and pork industry representatives at the annual swine seminar in Winnipeg earlier this month, Grahame Coleman told those gathered that pigs can’t always distinguish between people, particularly if they are dressed in similar garb like barn coveralls.

“Pigs can distinguish between people… only if they are dressed differently and there is a consistent difference in the way they behave,” said the Australian animal welfare researcher. “They tend to generalize.”

That means that if even one stockperson on any given farm is short tempered or gruff, pigs tend to see all livestock workers as short tempered and gruff.

“So if their experience has been negative from some people on the farm, they tend to avoid them regardless and you see that reflected in those farm figures where the entire farm shows a higher fear level,” he said, adding that higher fear levels translate directly into lower productivity.

Fearful pigs are also more difficult to handle and can result in a greater number of injuries among both animals and workers, Coleman added.

But new research indicates that people don’t have to do anything extreme to be perceived as aggressive by pigs, even the occasional slap, push or loud talking can negatively influence pig-human interactions, lowering herd productivity.

“The stockperson handling we’re talking about is not particularly adverse behaviours, they’re not instances of bad mishandling or malicious intent or cruelty, or anything like that… this is not what we are talking about in this situation. What we’re talking about is the way in which animals are routinely handled and it turns out that some of the things that were routine practice on farms, were having this deleterious effect on the fear levels of the animals,” Coleman explained.

Expanding on that idea, Coleman said further studies have revealed livestock workers who feel positively about giving a pig an occasional pat and speak to animals in an even or upbeat tone have not only the least fearful and most easily handled animals, but also the most productive ones — even if animal-human interactions last no more than two minutes per day.

“It’s generally accepted that stockpeople have a significant role in managing their animals, and no one is going to question that, but what we wanted to do is expand that notion to specific aspects of what stockpeople do in addition to the normal husbandry and management procedures,” he said. “What we found is that there is a significant role that stockpeople can play, both in determining the productivity on farm as well as meat quality at slaughter.”

Employee satisfaction also plays a role in animal productivity he added, noting employees who enjoy their work and feel secure in their job tend to have more positive interactions with pigs. The result is lowered levels of fear in the herd.

Coleman said proper training is key to getting livestock workers to adopt fear-reducing practices, but emphasized that all livestock workers must participate for a farm to see a significant improvement in herd fear levels.

“Training procedures which target the attitude and behaviour of stockpeople currently offer considerable opportunity to improve both pig productivity and welfare,” he said.

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With the final phase of the Canadian Pork Council’s PigTrace national traceability program now in effect, both commercial and hobby farms can face financial penalties for failure to comply.

Right now though regulators appear to still be focusing more on education than enforcement, but that could change.

“Even if you only have two or three pigs in the backyard, you have to comply,” said PigTrace Canada manager, Jeff Clark. “So whether I have one pig I bought this spring and it’s my first time buying a pig and I ship to slaughter this fall, even to a small abattoir… or I have a hog barn, you have to be registered.”

Fines start at $1,300 for minor infractions and serious breaches such as counterfeiting tags carry a $10,000 penalty. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency enforces the program, which was first introduced in July 2014.

While the federal inspection agency would not provide an interview regarding the traceability program, it intimated that no fines had been levied in a written response sent just before press time.

The email indicated that “at this time, CFIA is continuing to increase compliance by educating affected parties such as farmers, custodians of pigs and pet owners of their responsibilities to properly identify, keep records and report the movement of these animals.”

The statement went on to explain that educational tools include awareness campaigns and letters of non-compliance.

“Most government inspectors have been very reasonable and are focused on education, getting them in touch with us and then we can take it from there,” said Clark. “Now if it’s repeated activity, like not identifying a pig going to slaughter or not reporting movements or whatever, they will get a letter of non-compliance, which is a written notice sent to the person, the producer, the abattoir or whatever.”

So far, most cases of non-compliance have involved hobby farms or backyard farms that aren’t in regular contact with a producer organization and simply aren’t aware that there is a traceability program that requires their participation.

Clark said that of the 11,000 registrants the program had by June, about 3,000 of them were backyard hobby farmers. Many of whom only had a couple of pigs, which they intended to use for their own consumption.

“We do go the extra mile to make it simple for them, because I mean this is not a big brother program, it’s not so Maple Leaf can export, it’s because Canada doesn’t really have a lot of people in terms of human resources to respond to an emergency, so it’s about getting ahead of it if something happens, knowing where every pig is going to and from,” he said.

That makes sense to small-scale producers like Collin Ferris, who has about 100 pasture-raised pigs on his farm near Portage la Prairie, which he sells direct to the consumer.

“It’s import that we have some sort of food safety system in place,” he said. “We go to an abattoir, so we use the slap tattoos, and then they know whose animals is whose and where it comes from. Then we have a premise ID number and all that other good stuff.”

Given the traceability programs in place for Canadian beef, Ferris said it was only a matter of time before pork producers also got on board with increased traceability.

“It just makes sense,” he added.

However, the program does maintain some ambiguity around pet pigs and entertainment pigs, such as those used for petting zoos or racing. Clark said he understands why someone with a pet pig that will never leave a yard or petting zoo wouldn’t want to tag or tattoo the animal.

“I’m on the side of the person with the pet or the racing pig. They exist and we want to help people with that,” he said, adding an internal CFIA memo has urged inspectors to focus on “agricultural” animals. Pets and entertainment pigs still need to be registered and their movements reported, but Clark said he will defend the decision not to tag in those cases.

“It’s not like an auction where pigs are coming from all different locations and they’re mixed around and then are going out to different locations, ear tags do need to be in those pigs, because otherwise it would be impossible. But these pigs stay put or travel in a group,” he said.

While he didn’t want to single any one area of the country out for being slow to comply with the traceability program, Clark noted that Manitoba was ahead of the curve when it came to program adoption.

“So we keep working,” he said. “But I can say we’ve met a lot of really interesting people with this program, I mean there is the business side, trade and the global marketplace… and then there is the small-scale part, it’s been really interesting for sure.”

The post Fines now possible under traceability program appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

No load of hogs will ever travel from James Hofer’s Hutterite colony to Europe.

Nor will he likely know if any meat from his pigs ends up in Euro-bellies.

But he’s sure the Canada-EU free trade deal will bring more money to his west-of-Winnipeg community hog operation.

“With the percentage of pork that we need to export, any trade deal that we can negotiate will ultimately benefit the grassroots farmer, because the demand for the product is there and we’ll continue to grow it if the demand is there,” said Hofer.

That mood is general amongst hog barn operators across Canada. The deal with Europe will create another outlet for a product Canada produces to world standards but often has trouble getting into overseas markets.

Presently almost no Canadian pork goes to Europe. Various small allowances for special types of Canadian pork exist in trade agreements, but few exporters attempt to reach the European market.

Because of extremely small tariff-free quotas for Canadian pork, most pro­cessors aren’t willing to set up segregated slaughter and processing that can guarantee that none of the products or processes banned by Europe are not in their pork products.

The CETA creates a tariff-free quota for 80,000 tonnes of Canadain pork, as long as it does not contain certain common North American feed additives and doesn’t involve banned packing processes.

That’s a big expansion of the present few thousand tonnes allowed, and might tempt some small processors to go through the European certification system and solicit EU-friendly meat from compliant hog farms, the industry hopes.

New exports

Ron Davidson of the Canadian Meat Council said the CETA could lead to $400 million in pork exports if the complications of the European market can be worked out.

However, whether CETA will ever go from providing apparent market access to representing real access depends on how the deal is implemented.

Davidson said the regulations around technical matters will be key, as will the attitude of European regulators in applying the regulations.

Canadian Pork Council president Rick Bergmann said gaining official access to Europe is important, whether or not people expect Europeans to be fair or reasonable in implementing the access.

“In order to catch fish, you have to put your hook on the line,” said Bergmann.

“Our hook is on the line.”

And he said every extra tonne sold beyond Canada helps drag up the value of Canadian pork, and that’s something that will feed right back to farm gate prices for pigs.

“None of us are on an island. We’re all in this together,” said Bergmann.

“If we’re able to help our exporters and processors enter new markets, valuable markets, it’s not that we would like a piece of the pie: we need a piece of the pie.”

Hofer doesn’t need to be convinced CETA will probably help him and his colony.

“Any trade deal that we can negotiate with different companies will absolutely help our position in moving our product and marketing it.”

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