Yesterday, the IAgrE hosted the Landward 2007 Conference on Traceability across the Foodchain in Peterborough (program).
The morning session looked at Traceability Issues and Challenges. Christine Tacon, General Manager of The Co-operative Farms, gave some reasons why food traceability is so important. Farmers are distant from the final customer and receive very little feedback about what consumer want. They cannot show consumers how their products are grown (strict protocols, environmental stewardship, etc.) and the consumer, on the other hand, has very little visibility about the product she buys. Tacon also reported that consumer research has shown that consumer do want traceability and that it would add value to a product.
Martin Grantley-Smith, General Manager of the Red Meat Industry Forum, illustrated the hurdles of traceability across the meat supply-chain. He identified the key issues as the long, fragmented chain, the poor communication, the imbalance of power and the adversarial, commercial activity within the chain.
Among the other speakers were Brigitta Wolf from the German quality assurance organisation QS and Caroline Drummond, Chief Executive of LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) who was talking about traceability as a contribution to environmental management.
Meurig Raymond, Deputy President of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) talked about the farmers point of view and asked the question who will pay for the extra costs of traceability. Many farmers fear that they have to bear the extra costs.
The afternoon session started with Carla Gasparin and Sven Peets, PhD students from Cranfield University, who talked about their research on stakeholder requirements and the design of an automatic recording system for traceability.
The following session looked at Traceability in Practice, including Stephen Leese, Business Development Manager of John Deere Agri Services. Leese talked about John Deeres approach and claimed that traceability should be seen as an (important) by-product of farm management systems. There is no incentive for farmers to deploy a traceability system alone. Farm management system help farmers to manage their data and information better and traceability will then come for free.
