In 2014, biosecurity changed at Eichelberger Farms in Wayland, Iowa, when an ugly four-letter word rocked the U.S. pork industry: PEDV.
“Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) struck and it changed how we did everything with biosecurity,” said Corey Oswald, chief operating officer at Eichelberger Farms, during his presentation at Carthage Swine Conference. “We did what everyone did – we all got together, came up with a great list of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and plopped it on someone’s desk to implement.”
Initially, they had some success, he admits. But as time wore on and the operation grew, their plan stopped working well.
“Everyone was not on the same page whatsoever – there was no ownership,” he explains. “We had one guy with ownership putting SOPs on the table. Outside of that there was no ownership by people in our system. People had no sense of urgency.”
He says the biggest reason their biosecurity plans weren’t working was because people didn’t understand why they were being implemented. Although the employees had every bullet point in front of them, they still didn’t understand why except they were supposed to do it.
Something had to change.
Eichelberger Farms put a biosecurity team together in 2020 to start figuring out where the breakdowns were happening.
“We did environmental testing, vehicle testing. As a group, we decided how often to test, when to test, how to test. We spent a lot of money on testing just to see where we’re at,” Oswald says. “I think where we failed was that we did not take a common sense approach to biosecurity.”
For example, with much of their labor force coming from Mexico through the TN visa program, Eichelberger Farms housed their employees together. That quickly proved to be a challenge with employees working on different farms and living in the same house.
Oswald decided the team needed to get more buy-in from everyone. They started taking notes in their biosecurity team meetings. Although finger pointing was always something he fought hard to avoid, it still did.
The team started giving quizzes to employees and were shocked most people weren’t passing simple quizzes about their SOPs.
“Those results made us realize we had to help employees better understand why things were being asked of them,” Oswald says. “We had to get on the same page that it was about everyone helping each other. But honestly, the group went backward before it went forward.”
They started using elastic tie tags to help show if door tags were being broken, they swabbed outside carriers and field trucks, they relocated where they kept skid loaders, and they put comparisons on where the operation was a year ago to where it is now to help employees see the impact of implementing better biosecurity practices.
“For the first few years, we weren’t getting results that we were getting better, but as far as awareness and accountability, people began to understand the why,” he says. “The results eventually followed. Our inconsistencies have now become consistencies when it comes to biosecurity.”
Oswald says they still have failures, but now they really investigate where those failures come from.
“My goal was to get everyone to understand each other, work for improvement and have the same common goal,” he says. “I truly believe what changed is that everyone is getting a better sense of how to be accountable for each other and how to help each other.”
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