Western
Meeting of Poultry
Clinicians and Pathologists
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Clinicians and Pathologists
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The Computerization of Condemnation Reporting in High Line Speed Poultry Processing Plants Floyd Joss, DVM, MSc Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Condemnation reporting is one of the principle responsibilities of Federal Veterinarians in poultry processing plants. The volume of condemned birds and the repetitive nature of the task has often resulted in compromises in protocol, which have ultimately lead to concerns about the reliability of published statistics. When condemnation reporting was computerized, in Alberta in 1994 and 1995, the goal was to eliminate the tedium of tabulating condemnation statistics, as well as provide the producer with a more informative record of condemnations. The intent was to accomplish this with a protocol, which would be inherently more accurate than the existing system. In spite of the computerization in Alberta, Federal poultry plants across Canada use a wide variety of condemnation reporting protocols and as a result, the reliability of national poultry statistics remains questionable. The major problem with the existing system is with the distribution of condemned birds while the total number of condemned birds is accurately recorded in most plants. Dr. J.R. Bisaillion, Chief of Epidemmiology, Food Production and Inspection in Ottawa, in response to the condemnation concern, has stated "Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada is currently looking at ways to further enhance the condemnation certificate, one of which could be through statistical sampling of condemned carcasses". If the need for improvements in condemnation reporting is taken seriously by officials in Ottawa, a revamped system should be in place by June of 1997. The starting point of the computerized recording system is a tally sheet that the veterinarian’s uses, on the kill floor, to record a condition for each bird condemned. Information from the tally sheets and corresponding truckers weigh bills are entered, via data controlling entry screens, into CDXP, the poultry condemnation program. CDXP is written in VP-Info Professional (an xBASE dialect with powerful programming capabilities). xBASE is a term coined by the computing popular press to describe those programming languages, which are similar to dBASE. dBASE is a programmable database language that was an enormously successful product of Ashton-Tate in the early 1980’s. VP-Info has a built in compiler that speeds operation of applications and protects the code from the possibility of tampering by the end user. Although computerized condemnation reporting appears to have accomplished the goals that were set out in the beginning, at least one spin-off benefit has emerged. Data stored in the computer files is a valuable source of scientific information for the broiler industry. To date no one has spent time extracting information and correlations from the data, but it is expected that this process may begin soon. The data is in .dbf files that are readily imported into a variety of statistical packages for further analysis and reporting. |
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