It’s that time of the year where you brace yourself for the worst when the phone rings, says Adam Annegers, sow production manager at JBS, during the recent State of the Pork Industry Report.
“I call it the lift and shift,” Annegers says. “You can have your schedule all lined out, and then the phone rings and redirects you. Winter means being flexible because diseases thrive in this weather.”
Raising pigs in southeast Iowa comes with its fair share of health challenges and 2026 is no different. Now is a critically important time to make sure you provide needed support to your team, he says.
“At the onset of a health challenge in the sow barn, there’s not always a lot we can do to have a better outcome for the piglets,” Annegers points out. “It’s difficult on the teams. Focus on keeping your team motivated to get through difficult times knowing that at some point, disease pressure will lessen. Then, they can get back to raising a lot of good, healthy pigs again.”
This time of the year is always challenging, but he’s optimistic about what’s ahead.
“Pig prices are through the roof right now,” Annegers says. “Saving every pig and raising every pig that we can is important right now. Working with your teams to control what they can control helps. It’s time to be a big cheerleader.”
When PRRS Doesn’t Look Like PRRS
Randy Kuker, director of swine production for The Equity, had a strange incident occur in a barn recently.
“We had a group showing some clinical signs – it actually looked like a strep was going on,” Kuker explains. “We’re about 12 weeks on feed, which is rather late for us to be seeing signs of strep, but I had pigs down, kind of paddling, red, puffy eyes, all the classic symptoms. It also looked like maybe a late myco lameness issue.”
His team saw enough issues going on that they took some tissue samples and those samples came back positive for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).
“This was surprising to me, considering most of the pigs (if we got to them soon enough and treated them) responded to antibiotics fairly well,” Kuker says. “We had minimal death loss, but it came back as PRRS 1-12-2, a strain which I hadn’t seen in our area at all.”
They ran some antibiotics in the water and administered some antibiotics by injection. Over the course of a few weeks, they lost 0.75% to 1% of their pigs.
“It really wasn’t terrible, but it keeps us humble, knowing this virus can change and do different things than we least expect,” he says.
They also experienced an outbreak late last fall where they saw pigs with purple ears, Kuker adds. The mortalities had purple bellies which automatically made their team think it looked like Actinobacillus suis (A. suis). But it came back PRRS positive.
“I’m glad we’ve got a lot of good veterinarians out there who can give us some recommendations on what to do,” he says “I just wish we could find a way to eliminate it. But don’t see that coming anytime soon.”
PRRS Isn’t Going to Let Up
Cara Haden, DVM, director of animal welfare and biosecurity with Pipestone, says the Bob Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project has been a super helpful tool to see where the industry is at as a whole.
“Right now, cumulative incidence of PRRS as of January 21, is 8.2% which is actually pretty low,” Haden says “But I think it’s important to note that we often see two peaks every year. It looks like we’re maybe through that fall-winter peak, but there is the expectation that we will see a spring-summer peak again in 2026. If we follow the pattern of the last couple years, we’re going to see more PRRS this year than what we’ve seen so far.”
The number of PRRS strains continues to cause heartache across the pork industry.
“We’re getting more information about PRRS Lineage 1C strains being incredibly devastating and very virulent, seeing significant clinical signs with this particular virus family,” she says. “We’re also getting more information about increased shedding times and this virus being more difficult to eliminate from sow farms. These viruses are sticking around in the pig longer, which I think is super frustrating.”
Control What You Can Control
Fortunately the U.S. pork industry is entering a time where it may be possible to spend a little more money to help prevent disease breaks.
“We can’t always control the fact that pigs might break with a lateral PRRS introduction at some point during the growing period, but we can make sure that they don’t break with ileitis,” Haden says. “We can make sure they don’t break with salmonella or that they don’t break with circovirus.”
Trying to pinch pennies on vaccines by partial dosing or foregoing them all together is a dangerous game.
“I’m seeing a lot more freedom from producers to do the things that veterinarians would love to see them do all the time,” Haden says.
Be sure to record it and keep 12 months of documentation of vaccination treatments as required for PQA site assessments, says Brad Eckberg, account executive at MTech Systems.
“Then use that information to ultimately determine how it is working for you,” Eckberg says. “I’m a big fan of learning from successes and failures. Use the data you are keeping to help with decision making, maybe even for future changes in the protocols.”
Watch or listen to their entire discussion that delves into the impact of winter on your operation, wean pig health and nutrition tips, and conversations taking place at trade shows and more in the Farm Journal’s PORK State of the Pork Industry Report.
