Despite the layers and layers of biosecurity in place, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) keeps finding a way through. It’s very challenging for farms and veterinarians trying to fight this costly disease.
“A couple years ago, I felt like a good vet every summer. Then, every winter, I felt like a terrible vet because of PRRS and influenza,” Cara Haden, DVM, director of animal welfare at Pipestone, said during the Q2 State of the Pork Industry Report. “It seems like these challenges are not seasonal anymore. It has been a really, really frustrating summer for the industry.”
She says modern strains are different than what the industry has battled in the past. Recent research led by Christine Mainquist-Whigham at Pillen Family Farms and Daniel Linhares at Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine have described extended shedding periods and times where animals have started shedding again after previously negative tests.
“We’ve got a summer intern project right now where we’re looking at gilt shedding,” Haden says. “We’re really frustrated with the amount of time that some of these gilts are shedding after intentional exposure during a closure.”
Are We to Blame?
Adam Annegers, sow production manager at JBS, wonders if the industry is “doing it to ourselves.”
“Part of it is veterinarians have done their jobs too well, and we’ve eliminated all the little weak viruses out there,” Annegers says. “Viruses adapt and they survive. As we continue to eliminate the little softies out there, the viruses that remain become a lot tougher. You definitely feel the effects more when they come in now.”
There’s no question nature finds a way, Haden says.
“We put in filters and do all sorts of stuff to keep it out, but PRRS is desperate to get into our pigs,” she adds.
Brad Eckberg, account executive at MTech Systems, says people talk a lot about biosecurity, but wonders how often “we shoot ourselves in the foot” having to deal with issues that could ultimately be fixed.
“My guess is nine times out of 10,” says Randy Kuker, director of swine production for The Equity. “When you see the same virus being moved around to multiple locations, you need to look inward and ask how are we moving this virus around?”
The PRRS breaks Kuker has been seeing over the past several years have been caused by different strains. That’s even more frustrating because it’s similar to a farm that’s 10 miles away, but it’s just a little different, he says.
Execute the Basics
The Equity is focusing on reinforcing its practices to make sure they are doing what they have said they would do when it comes to biosecurity and disease prevention.
“I think you get to certain stages of production on the wean-to-finish side, and we think, ‘Well, the pigs are bigger, they’re healthier and it’s maybe not as important.’ Then, you’re a week away from topping the site out, and you bring PRRS in. You can’t medicate those pigs at that point and it’s a mess.”
One area he thinks the wean-to-finish side can be a little lackadaisical about is in the disinfection of supplies.
“On the grow-finish side, there’s so much low-hanging fruit,” Haden agrees. “I mean, Adam’s skin is raw from showering into sow farms. I’ve showered like 14 times this week. Then, we go in and out of grow-finish barns in a very different way. We have different standards for grow-finish, but the reality is, there’s PRRS all over the place.”
Although Annegers says this summer has been relatively nice to his sow farms, he’s knocking on wood as he knows it’s not been nice to many of his colleagues in the industry.
“Consistently executing the basic protocols at a high level is very important in all aspects, from employee entry to mortality removal,” Annegers says. “Sometimes we overthink the basics. Humans are really good at making things more complicated than we need to make them. Taking a step back and observing processes and you will pick up on those things where just a slight change can make a huge difference to a farm.”
Haden says this conversation highlights that despite having PRRS in the U.S. for a long time, the industry still knows very little about this virus. She is optimistic about the insights that can be gleaned from whole genome sequencing and focusing research dollars on immune system response.
“I’ve heard some stuff about some different tools coming to the market, potentially to really help us with this virus,” Haden says. “Man, we need it. We need research. We need answers. We’re certainly not at the point where we know exactly what to do as an industry yet to get rid of this.”
Where Does Welfare Weigh In?
The pork industry is data-driven and does a great job tracking average daily gain, feed conversion and more. But Haden says one of the things it fails to track are welfare metrics and outcomes for the animals.
“How much lameness do we have in the barn? How many animals are retreating? Farrowing complications? What are the outcomes looking at treatment success?” she asks. “That’s been something I’ve been really focused on the last couple months running reports.”
The numbers have been eye-opening, Haden says. For example, she’s been looking at PRRS breaks to find answers to an important question: Is it worth it to treat individual animals during a PRRS break?
Looking at treated animals and outcomes 10 weeks before the PRRS break and 10 weeks after the PRRS break, she said the data shows it’s absolutely worth it.
“We can see really good treatment success rates in the midst of a really nasty PRRS break,” Haden says. “We learned during at least one particular PRRS break, it caused a lot of lameness. We’re tracking these lameness metrics and how many animals we are treating for lameness and how many treatment days it requires to get animals better. We saw that PRRS massively increased both lameness and treatment days.”
She says knowing that allows her to be able to warn their teams that they are seeing this trend, but they’ve run the numbers already and know it’s worth it to treat the animals.
“As an industry, this data is not hard for us to grab up and start being able to utilize to make some better decisions,” she says.
Watch or listen to their entire discussion that delves into the impact of hog prices on management decisions to paying employees overtime and more in the Farm Journal’s PORK State of the Pork Industry Report.
