Arrangements for managing residues on dairy farms are well established. As a result, dairy farm food safety programs are granted equivalency to the meat industry’s Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) program based on the programs sharing the same outcomes.
However, LPA has recently added two new modules to the LPA program (biosecurity and animal welfare) in addition to the food safety requirements.
In order to maintain equivalency, it’s important that dairy farm food safety/QA programs include these elements – this is understood to already be the case in the majority of instances.
Dairy farmers are required to join LPA to use the National Vendor Declaration (NVD) form when selling cattle but are currently exempt from random LPA audits (as they already get audited by the dairy food safety regulator). However, they can be subject to targeted meat/LPA audits which usually follow up previous residue violations, with the two main issues being associated with bobby calf residues and dairy beef.
In order to maintain compliance with LPA requirements farmers and auditors need to be aware that they need to prepare and review beef as well as dairy animal treatment records at dairy food safety/QA program audits.