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Better Farming Ontario Featured Articles

Better Farming Ontario magazine is published 11 times per year. After each edition is published, we share featured articles online.


Feds zoned out on West Hawk Lake livestock monitoring station

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

AgMedia Inc.

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

A program that would enable Canada to apply border-like controls over east-west domestic livestock shipments remains stalled because funding ran out.

The program involves introducing a livestock monitoring point at West Hawk Lake, on the border of Manitoba and Ontario. The location is a “choke point” of rail and highway corridors between Eastern and Western Canada, and a monitor station there can track, trace or even limit shipments between the two parts of the country, allowing producers in one section to continue their business if a disease outbreak affects the other.

Financed with $3.5 million from the federal government and the country’s livestock industry, the program operated as a pilot for two years until money ran out in February. “Unfortunately, government has chosen . . . not to fund the full activation” of the program, says Curtiss Littlejohn, former chair of Ontario Pork and a member of the committee that developed the program.

Because the flu outbreak was an isolated instance in Alberta he doubts the program would have played a role in protecting animal health — this time around. “There are no market hogs that move east-west (to Ontario from Alberta); the cost is prohibitive,” he explains.

But the current situation shows the advantages of maintaining zones, he says. BF

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