A Solution on Pork Quality Traceability from Farm to Dinner Table in Tianjin City, China

In order to meet government supervision of pork production safety as well as consumer's right to know what they buy and protect the public safety of pork food, this study adopts animal identification, intelligent personal digital assistant (PDA) reading and writing, general packet radio service (GPRS), and other information technologies, proposes a pork tracking and traceability inferstructure based on pork production substrace flow and data flow, designs the metadata structure and related datatbases for farming, slaughtering, and retailing sector based on intensive pig farming and smallhold pig farming, develops three different data-recording systems, and finally establishes a public network platform for the information inquiry in light of “the administrative rules on identification and rearing files for animal and poultry” in China. The farming process information system supplies early warning for the usage of drugs and feed additives based on data of every individual pig and timely uploading all events data to remote traceability database when pigs are sold; the PDA data collecting system can collect farming events data for pigs fed by farmers and submit to the center database by GPRS; the web-based Tianjin's pork traceability platform can integrate all identifications and related pork quality data from farming, slaughtering to marketing by online, and achieve pork tracking from product origin to consumption and tracing in the turnover direction. It is feasible to realize pork quality traceability by identification technologies developed and/or integrated, metadata specifications designed, three data-recording systems developed, and web-inquiring platform established. Some individual technical bottlenecks will be resolved with the development of communication technologies. The full implementation in Tianjin, China, will supply technical support for guaranteeing the quality and safety of pork production and meeting consumer's demands.