Thank you for having me here today.
The program I'm involved in is the verified beef program. It's a national HACCP-based program that has received CFIA technical review on a national basis.
I've been delivering the program to farmers in a workshop format for five years. So my level of expertise is from meeting directly with the farmers at the workshop level.
Nationally, we have the same program delivered right across the country. What is delivered in Ontario is also delivered in Alberta. That's very important for this group to know.
Nationally, we have over 12,000 producers who have been through our workshops, with the majority of those in Alberta, of course. There are financial incentives there to encourage producers to go through the program. There are 4,500 producers in our program in Alberta, with 2,500 here in Ontario, followed by Manitoba and Saskatchewan. As I said, certain provinces have extra financial incentives to encourage uptake of the program. Obviously, beef is not a supply-managed commodity, so to get the producers to come to the workshop you sometimes need a little carrot.
The VBP program participates in and shares program developments with other commodities through the Canadian On-Farm Food Safety Working Group, and it looks at solving common challenges with those other commodities. A recent project compared our program with similar ones in the United States and Australia and pointed to some advantages, such as the standardization of our national program in terms of both producer requirements and conformance assessments.
On the farm, producers continue to point to the immediate benefits they see from taking part in the program, such as improved efficiency of animal health product use. Whether they are large or small operations, reviews of their practices seem to yield a small analysis showing them what they can do better on their farms. That's a bit surprising, because most of the early adopters of our program are considered to be the well-run facilities, which are out there trying to be at the front edge of the program.
We go through five different standard operating procedures when we're delivering the program at these workshops. It's a proactive HACCP-based format that we're using, and it's producer-driven. We're trying to identify potential food safety hazards, such as chemical residues from animal health use, and physical hazards from possible broken needle fragments at processing time.
We cover these five operating procedures in that workshop format, and we go through animal health management, feeding and watering, cattle shipping, pesticide control, manure management, training of staff, and communications.
I think most of the group has heard how that works through some of the other commodities, so I won't draw you into each of those SOPs, because they're specific to on-farm programs. But by using these operating procedures and the record templates we set the farmers up with, we have a higher level of assurance that the food safety measures are being met on farm.
I think that's how I'll conclude.