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Europe's farmers and processors play up quality assurance and traceabilityButchers with in-store photographs of their pork suppliers and milk bottles bearing production details are signs of a growing trend to transparent productionby NORMAN DUNN"Quality-assured" and "traceability" are terms you can't help tripping over in European grocery stores nowadays. Whether it's milk, meat or wheat flour for bread making, there are a growing number of products coming into the stores now with production site and processing data on the label.For instance, Thönes Natur, a meat company in the Ruhr Valley of Germany offers point-of-sale catalogues with addresses and photographs of the farmers and their families that produce the lamb, pork and beef the firm sells over the counters of contracted butchers. And in Britain hog farmer Jimmy Butler uses his website www.freerangepigs.co.uk both to sell the pork from his 2,000-sow outdoor herd and to let consumers across the country know exactly where the meat comes from and how it is produced. Nor have crop growers been letting the grass grow under their feet in this respect. In Germany, a battery of small flour mills now contract wheat and rye growers to deliver so-called "controlled production" grain with full details of husbandry methods and the exact farm and sometimes field location. Bakeries that these mills supply use some of this "traceability" information on the labels of their bread and cookies. It's a fact that the smaller farming businesses and food processors over here were the first to adopt transparent production. Before affordable computerization of records was possible, they were the only ones able to keep track of product flow from field to fork with conventional paperwork. But now the microchip means the really big players can record as many production details as they want. Westfleisch, one of Europe's largest pork processors, uses this kind of detailed documentation for the 14,000 hogs it slaughters and joints every day in its Westphalia plant. It has found that traceability not only forges closer customer links out in the stores, but the gathered information can also be redirected back to the individual hog producers to improve methods on the farm. Westfleisch hogs arrive at the slaughterhouse with a special barcode ear tag detailing farm and breed details as well as hog ID number. The code is automatically scanned as the carcass starts its long journey down the slaughter line. The automatically recorded carcass details, including muscling and fat percentage, are added to the record, as are the line veterinary's reports on quality and any disease symptoms in liver and lungs, for example. All this information flows back to the farmer along with payment details. And the computer capacity at the slaughter plant is large enough to keep all farm details on record so that the management there can match carcass quality or any disease signs with the type of barns, ventilation and feeding system on individual farms. Another example of big organizations following this traceability path features Sodiaal from France, Europe's sixth-biggest dairy co-operative, which processes some two billion litres annually with a turnover last year of over $3 billion Cdn. Only two years ago, this co-op's La Route Du Lait program resulted in around 150 million litres being delivered from selected farms and sold under a separate quality-assurance label as drinks (Candia GrandLait) or Camembert cheeses (Riches Mont and Le Rustique). In 2004, the demand had more than doubled and last year over 400 million litres, or 20 per cent of the co-op's total capacity, were being channelled into this quality stream. The supplying dairy farms have to fulfil six different high-standard modules covering aspects such as animal health, barn and production hygiene and feed quality. The resultant GrandLait comes into the stores with the label showing such things as exact time and date of milk delivery to the processing plant. Is a new farmer elite -- the quality assured producer -- being created in Europe by these schemes? This could well be the case. But, so far anyway, this new class of farmer isn't earning any more than more conventional neighbours.
"In times of overproduction and low retail prices, it's just good that we have a way of increasing public awareness about the job we do," commented a Sodiaal milk supplier. "Such programs don't pay extra now, but could be a useful insurance for survival with an increasingly selective customer base." BF Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.
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