Meetings will address draft code of practice for pig care

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario Pork has scheduled two producer information meetings to talk about the draft Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs released by the National Farm Animal Care Council earlier this month.

The meetings are:

• June 25 in Guelph at the Holiday Inn on Scottsdale Drive from 6:30-8:30 p.m.
• June 27 in London at the Best Western Stoneridge Inn on Burtwistle Lane from 1:30-3:30 p.m.

A meeting was also planned for Kingston but has been cancelled because not enough farmers signed up for it.

Farmers are asked to pre-register through email at: kim.croft@ontariopork.on.ca or by calling Ontario Pork at 519-767-4600 or 1-877-668-7675, extension 1402. Farmers can still attend a meeting if they don’t pre-register but Ontario Pork is asking farmers to let them know if they’re coming so they can book a big enough room.

The meetings are being held to review the highlights of the code. The week after the July 1 long weekend farmers will have a chance to have their say through a telephone town hall. Ontario Pork spokesperson Mary Jane Quinn says they’ll do polling to get feedback. Ontario Pork has about five questions it will ask and farmers will be able to press a button and vote on them. The town hall is for farmers only.

The draft code is available for review on the farm animal care council’s website at: www.nfacc.ca/.

Quinn says the information “sessions themselves are educational.” A speaker will review the highlights of the draft code, what the changes are compared to the current code and the process for gathering feedback on the daft and finalizing it.

Once the farmer feedback is finished through the telephone town hall, Ontario Pork will work on its submission to comment on the draft for the farm animal care council, she says. Ontario Pork is also encouraging all farmers to make a submission on the draft code to the animal care council.  

“We’re telling everybody to do that,” she says.

For farmers who don’t have Internet, they can get a copy of the code and “there’s a procedure as to how they can submit their comments that don’t have to be online,” Quinn says. Farmers without Internet can call Quinn at Ontario Pork at extension 1303 for help.

In other news about the code, the Canadian Pork Council, which requested the farm animal care council update it, supports the process of developing the code, says Catherine Scovil, assistant executive director. But now the draft code is out for public comment it wants to hear from farmers about its impacts “prior to taking any kind of position about what’s actually in the code. There’s a distinction between the process and the product.”

The pork council is also completing an economic analysis of some of the proposed requirements in the code, such as the one stipulating that mated gilts and sows must be housed in groups as of July 1, 2024 and that individual stalls may be used only for up the 28 days after the date of the last breeding. Scovil says they’re looking at the results of the analysis now “so it’s not something that’s out for public consumption yet.”

Scovil says they looked at what they thought would be the major impacts on farmers, including the elimination of gestation stalls. It’s up to the pork council’s board to decide what to do with the economic analysis or if it will be released publicly. BF