We would love to, because it's our favourite subject.
As a national industry organization representing primary producers, as my counterparts know, it becomes our role to deliver traceability. “Deliver” means getting producers engaged and participating, but it also means helping ensure that the government's regulatory requirements are upheld and met.
What that means in the Canadian context is that the government makes the regulations and says, “Here are the traceability regulations. Industry, make it happen.”
We have been involved in that because we've had mandatory ID in the sheep industry since 2004. We've been involved in delivering traceability for that amount of time. Traceability has evolved from simply tracking where animals go for reasons of disease response to tracking everything about that animal—tracking for export purposes, for product assurances and for disease monitoring.
I sit on Canada's FMD working group, the working group for foot-and-mouth disease. We just had a large discussion yesterday about whether we are going to use vaccines and about a vaccine strategy: How do we know which animals have been vaccinated? How do we know when to depopulate? It gets very complex. It's more than just looking at where they went; it's about the things that happened to that animal in its life that are important to somebody further down the chain.
In our mandate to deliver traceability and also to wrap all of those requirements into it, we felt that what existed in Canada—no disrespect to my counterparts—wasn't sufficient to do all of that in a single system, which is really where it needs to live, so we built a new technology from the ground up at the Canadian Sheep Federation.
You'll be surprised to hear “the Canadian Sheep Federation”, “blockchain” and “artificial intelligence” all in the same discussion.
We built a tracing system. At its core, it is designed to meet, and does meet, regulatory requirements for disease tracking. On top of that, it meets our industry's need to scan the tag and know something about the animal. When we challenged the industry to say what it needs from it, that's it.
Now, every player has a different need with regard to the data that it finds. However, the goal of our technology and our work in traceability is to create a system, an integrator of information about that animal, to affix that information, such as whether it's certified disease-free for export or is on an insurance program to meet some product-free requirement from an exporting country. All the data that we collect becomes part of the animal's history as the animal moves through the supply chain. By virtue of traceability, we connect one player to the next player, and we move that information with the animal.
We started working on this in 2019. We did a use case study with the community of federal regulators and the CFIA shortly after that, and that solidified that blockchain would be the best fit for livestock traceability. It's been uphill-downhill since then.
With regard to that system, that technology that we've built, we've now submitted a proposal to the CFIA for it to be the system used in the regulated space for traceability in Canada.