Building on dairy traceability & taking the next step together!

The objective of any livestock traceability system is to provide timely and accurate information to reduce the impact of disease or other animal health emergencies. Achieving this helps to enhance the sustainability of the dairy sector. DairyTrace wants to ensure that the efforts of reporting traceability information provide the best results for different needs across the dairy industry.

What does this mean?

After four years of traceability data collection, DairyTrace activities have matured to focus on data completeness and integrity as well as value added benefits over and above traceability. Therefore, our focus will now include three main objectives:

1. Maintaining current dairy producer support in traceability reporting for proAction® requirements and federal regulations
2. New - Working on initiatives that improve the accuracy and integrity of traceability events reported to DairyTrace
3. New - Expanding to incorporate all participants in the dairy value chain to familiarize themselves with DairyTrace and provide seamless reporting in accordance with federal regulations as well as voluntary event reporting. 

All three of these objectives will continue to improve the traceability system and better promote opportunities to incorporate added value information that will benefit both dairy producers as well as all participants in the dairy value chain.

How will this be done?

Providing excellent customer service to dairy producers continues to be a key priority. In addition, the Customer Services team will undertake initiatives and tasks that improve the quality of data in the DairyTrace database. Achieving this objective will require outreach to dairy producers and other value chain participants to verify reported information, improve premises identification information, and identify system improvements.

The team will also work more closely with other partners in the value chain and help them report traceability events for animals identified with white tags directly to DairyTrace. Traceability events reported by value chain participants are vital to a complete traceability system from an animal’s birth to end of life. 

"All reported events submitted to DairyTrace since October 2020 have built the foundation of a traceability system that will benefit farmers and the dairy industry when needed.’’

How do these initiatives improve traceability?

The outcomes of this work will be:

• Improved disease response and preparedness
• Provision of quality data to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
• Additional reporting options for all participants of the dairy value chain
• Ability to incorporate value added information
• Improved premise ID (PID) information

What type of data integrity initiatives are under way?

• Premises Completeness – Events reported on a PID not already in the DairyTrace system are identified. These events help the team improve missing premises information in the system or correct data entry errors on reported traceability events.
• Clean Up of Inactive Accounts – Identifying and cleaning up DairyTrace accounts that are currently inactive to create a more relevant database.
• Customer Services Training – Training of the Customer Services team to help other value chain participants with traceability reporting and understanding regulations.
• Tag Activation Reporting – Includes reviewing low reporting DairyTrace accounts for dairy producers that may no longer have a milking herd or assisting them if they need help reporting.

Check out our 2024 SnapShot for an overview of different initiatives and yearly metrics!

Have questions or need help on the above topics? Please contact Customer Services at 1-866-558-7223 or by email at info@dairytrace.ca. For tag orders email tags@dairytrace.ca.