Canada's livestock traceability initiative presents a daunting task
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
by JIM ALGIE
UPDATE: Thursday October 16, 2014 Canadian farmers should see a fully traceable, national records system for livestock by late 2015 or early 2016, the executive director of a new, information services agency assigned the task said today.
Joshua Belinko heads Canadian Agri-Traceability Services, the non-profit organization created to complete work on a computerized, livestock, tracking system under development for at least 10 years. Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced $7.5 million in traceability funding recently. That money basically allows Belinko and his crew to blend two existing data bases and get the long-promised, national system up and running.
“We’re deep into it,” Belinko said during an interview today from his Ottawa office. With employees in Longueuil, Quebec, and Calgary, Alberta, Belinko’s organization is to blend data-bases created in recent years by two separate organizations, the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency (CCIA) in Calgary and Agri-Tracabilite Quebec (ATQ) in Longueuil.
“We’ve been at it a few months,” Belinko said. His staff is hired and work is well underway.
“We’re looking at somewhere in December of 2015, January 2016 to have a launch,” Belinko said. He expects a pilot launch for one species of livestock to work out any bugs before proceeding with inauguration of the complete national system for all livestock commodity groups.
Belinko emphasized close contacts among his organization, the CCIA and ATQ as well as national livestock commodity groups, all of whom have representation on working committees.
Some outside observers have expressed impatience with slow progress to date on traceability projects.
Belinko said he “understands the sentiment” but underlined the project’s complexity and importance. Farmer representatives with whom he has been working directly understand “why it has taken so long to get to this point” and are “aware of the magnitude of the work,” he said.
The task of Belinko’s organization is essentially computer systems management. It’s the detailed work of guaranteeing information security, forming business requirements and protocols and establishing functional requirements for the final system.
They’re taking it in three sub-projects all running concurrently, Belinko said. One deals with ATQ, which is the most advanced existing system. A Canadian Pork Council system that began operating earlier this year and became mandatory for producers in July and the CCIA project for cattle, sheep, horses and bison constitute separate work projects.
“We’ve got about a two-year implementation for development and roll out time frame and following that a couple of years of operations,” Belinko said. Federal funds should pay for full development and implementation activities with the expectation that government and industry ultimately will share operating costs, he said.
“Historically we’ve had independent systems and independent data bases,” the traceability services director said. “It just made sense from a business perspective to have that come together and have a single place where they could manage this information.”
“It’s important to understand that ATQ and CCIA are the founding members of my organization . . . we’re working very closely with them and collaborating on this,” Belinko said. END OF UPDATE
A recently-announced, $7.5 million, federal government grant for the two-year-old, non-profit agency, Canadian Agri-Traceability Services, may complete work on the country’s long-promised, national tracking system for livestock; then again it may not.
Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced federal funding, Oct. 9, in Calgary for design and operation of a unified, livestock traceability data base. The announcement included no timetable for completing the work.
And Canadian Agri-Traceability Services board chair Terry Kremeniuk wasn’t making timing promises in a recent interview following Ritz’s announcement. When federal, provincial and territorial agriculture ministers announced in January of 2009 a mandatory system for livestock and poultry, they predicted operations within two years.
A hog traceability system begun in 2002 by the Canadian Pork Council and also financed partly by federal funds became mandatory, July 1, this year. The work plan for a complete system published on the web site of the Calgary-based, Canadian Cattle Identification Agency (CCIA) extends to December of 2016.
Asked about timing for a fully operating, national system, Kremeniuk said the federal government’s $7.5 million means traceability services workers can now create “the components” of that system.
“The challenge is to encourage producers to use them,” Kremeniuk said from his office in Regina. Executive director of the Canadian Bison Association, Kremeniuk is that group’s delegate for the cattle identification agency and now heads the board for traceability services.
Ontario Sheep Marketing Agency General Manager Jennifer MacTavish agrees with Kremeniuk about the need for producer buy-in. Individual sheep have been registered nationally in Canada since 2004 and the industry now requires records for the movement of breeding stock on to farms.
What began with metal ear tags and paper records for scrapies control has evolved over 10 years to a system of radio frequency tags for animals capable of providing a wide range of production and food quality information from a data based managed by the cattle identification agency.
But the tags haven’t generated much data for producers so far. And there’s a danger of burn out among producers because of missed deadlines on full system implementation, MacTavish said Wednesday in an interview.
“It’s really hard to get buy-in when people are getting burnt out talking about it,” MacTavish said.
Kremeniuk cites the complexity of the task.
“It’s important to recognize when you’re dealing with a national strategy with a number of provinces and territories and different sectors, everybody plays an important piece of the puzzle,” Kremeniuk said. “We have just got to get all the puzzles in place to create that panoramic view of traceability that we all want,” he said.
It’s a project intended mainly to help identify problems and improve consumer confidence in Canada’s food production systems. After years of preliminaries, registration of individual food animals in Canada is now widespread.
Registration of individual livestock premises and methods for tracking the movement of animals from place to place has just begun in some regions.
Part of the work of the traceability services agency is to unify data bases developed in recent years by the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency and a separate, Quebec organization, Agri-tracabilite Quebec (ATQ). ATQ began tracking cattle in 2002 with a system subsequently extended to include sheep (2004) and deer (2009), the ATQ website says.
“The first step is animal identification,” Kremeniuk said of his national project. “For the beef industry, dairy, bison; that step is complete.”
“Now the provinces are working on premises ID,” he said, emphasizing the need for accuracy in recording locations for livestock rearing and marketing. Some provinces have completed much of that work; others are still working at it.
After premises ID, “the strategies will evolve to record the movement of animals,” Kremeniuk said.
In his Oct. 9 announcement, Agriculture Minister Ritz emphasized trade advantages of traceability for Canadian livestock operators. He described traceability as “a growing requirement for many markets and the world.”
Technical challenges associated with finding reliable methods for identifying individual animals appear to have been met. Current tags using radio-frequency identification technology “appear to work reasonably well,” Kremeniuk said.
Traceability services’ plan is to merge the separate CCIA and ATQ data bases and make it available to other users. Sheep producers are current participants in the CCIA project.
Asked if the merger of data bases predicts the end is near for traceability’s lengthy design and implementation phase, Kremeniuk said “the end is a pretty strong term particularly when technology is changing.”
“We may have ingredients for a very good data base then new technology comes forward and makes it even better,” he said. Kremeniuk defended the usefulness of traceability for livestock growers.
“Any time you have a tool that provides a level of assurance that people can trace where their product ultimately comes from it provides a comfort level amongst consumers,” he said. “Better that you have that in your global market tool box rather than not have it,” Kremeniuk said.
OSMA’s MacTavish predicts traceability will come but wouldn’t put a date on full implementation. Earlier announcements underestimated the task’s complexity, she said.
“I think it’ll come. I think it has to come not just for us to be able to manage a foreign animal disease outbreak or for us to be able to manage recalls,” MacTavish said. “From the sheep industry perspective, getting producers the information they need to make good management and business decisions, I think there’s a role to pay here in traceability.”
“But it’s changing the way we do business and it’s changing the culture of the industry and you can’t put a drop dead date on it,” MacTavish said. Quebec’s early success implementing traceability reflects that government’s strong financial support for the concept, she said, and predicted further costs to come.
“I don’t want to sound in any way that it’s not appreciated,” MacTavish said of government spending to date on traceability. “But if we’re going to be asking for full scale traceability we need to be clear that the cost can’t be borne on the shoulders of primary producers alone or the packing plant alone; there needs to be a huge commitment.” BF