Moving Toward a National Solution for Dairy Cattle Traceability: DairyTrace

Dairy farmers want to provide consumers with the knowledge that we have very high standards in Canada for dairy cattle traceability, so they can better understand where their food comes from. DairyTrace will deliver on this as it will track movement of animals and speed up reactions if an animal health emergency occurs. Originally initiated by the DFC Board of Directors in 2016, DairyTrace is supported today by various dairy groups and builds on the expertise of CDN, which already provides several data management and information services for Canadian dairy cattle of all breeds. In September 2017, CFIA confirmed that CDN meets the qualification criteria required to become a Responsible Administrator, as defined under federal regulations. Today, funding was announced that has been approved through the Assurance Systems stream of the Agri-Marketing Program under Growing Forward 2, to bring DairyTrace one step closer to reality.

”We would like to thank Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) for the funding that helped initiate the development of the DairyTrace solution”, said Pierre Lampron, DFC president. “We look forward to being able to tell dairy farmers that DairyTrace is open for business within the year, and in maintaining this important working relationship with the federal government in years to come.”

“We also want to draw attention to the recent agreement between CDN and Agri-Traçabilité Québec (ATQ) as the contracted data management service provider", said Norm McNaughton, CDN Board Chairman. “The AGTWeb platform is well recognized for its outstanding functions related to the three pillars of traceability, namely animal identification, premise identification and tracking of animal movement, as well as disease surveillance traceback. All these functions are important to achieving our high expectations for the useful and critical role that traceability performs in DFC's customer assurance initiative, proAction.”