CFIA approves DairyTrace

Jun 24, 2020

The national dairy cattle traceability program will come online in the fall

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Canada’s national dairy cattle traceability program will be operational this October.

Dairy Farmers of Canada and Lactanet Canada have been working on the program, known as DairyTrace, since 2016. On June 8, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency announced its support for Lactanet to be the national administrator of the program responsible for dairy cattle.

The program also received funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership.

DairyTrace will consist of three main pillars, said Brian Van Doormaal, chief services officer with Lactanet.

The first pillar is related to animal identification.

“The first one is unique lifetime identification of every animal born,” he told Farms.com. “An animal receives a specific number that’s dedicated to dairy cattle. The number would remain with that animal from its birth to end of life.”

The second pillar of DairyTrace is premises identification.

“This is an identification number given to any premises or location in Canada that an animal may reside in during its lifetime,” Van Doormaal said. “Every dairy farm will have a premises identification number, every assembly yard, every auction yard and every abattoir would have a number.”

Premises IDs are managed at the provincial level. Farmers must know their individual numbers and have them registered with the province.

DairyTrace’s final pillar is movement tracking.

The database helps keep track of dairy cattle moving in and out of premises and who the transporter is. When the animal’s life ends, the identification number it received at birth is then retired.

An important reason for having a national traceability program is disease surveillance.

Having multiple data points can help minimize potential outbreaks, Van Doormaal said.

“If there was a disease outbreak on a farm and the incubation period is 14 days, you could look back at the animals that were on the farm with the disease,” he said. “You can backtrack to see where the disease may have come from, and forward track to see who else may contract it.”

An added benefit of DairyTrace is consumer trust.

“Consumers are looking for safe products and the dairy industry wants to deliver on that,” he said. “We can ensure that the animal that produced the milk was on a farm and passed quality assurance tests on that farm.”

DairyTrace isn’t a public database to search for any animal, but account holders can look up animals within individual accounts.

“If it is your animal, you can have complete traceability on animals you do own,” Van Doormaal said.

The national program is replicating a provincial traceability program on a larger scale.

Agri-Traçabilité Québec has been keeping data points on dairy cattle in Quebec for 18 years.

“Farmers in Quebec have had tons of experience, and that makes us confident that DairyTrace will meet the needs of Canadian dairy farmers very well,” Van Doormaal said.

Video: US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Eric van Heugten, PhD, professor and swine extension specialist at North Carolina State University, recently spoke at the Iowa Swine Day Pre-Conference Symposium, titled Soybean Meal 360°: Expanding our horizons through discoveries and field-proven feeding strategies for improving pork production. The event was sponsored by Iowa State University and U.S. Soy.

Soybean meal offers pig producers a high-value proposition. It’s a high-quality protein source, providing essential and non-essential amino acids to the pig that are highly digestible and palatable. Studies now show that soybean meal provides higher net energy than current National Research Council (NRC) requirements. Plus, soybean meal offers health benefits such as isoflavones and antioxidants as well as benefits with respiratory diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

One of several ingredients that compete with the inclusion of soybean meal in pig diets is dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS).

“With DDGS, we typically see more variable responses because of the quality differences depending on which plant it comes from,” said Dr. van Heugten. “At very high levels, we often see a reduction in performance especially with feed intake which can have negative consequences on pig performance, especially in the summer months when feed intake is already low and gaining weight is at a premium to get them to market.”

Over the last few decades, the industry has also seen the increased inclusion of crystalline amino acids in pig diets.

“We started with lysine at about 3 lbs. per ton in the diet, and then we added methionine and threonine to go to 6 to 8 lbs. per ton,” he said. “Now we have tryptophan, isoleucine and valine and can go to 12 to 15 lbs. per ton. All of these, when price competitive, are formulated into the diet and are displacing soybean meal which also removes the potential health benefits that soybean meal provides.”