When assessing the overall health of your barns, certain key factors can enhance productivity and profitability. Balancing cost management with the health of pigs requires a holistic approach of evaluating each animal but also looking at the health of the whole barn.
Jorge Estrada, Carthage director of nutrition, recently delved into feed cost-saving strategies with the Carthage team. However, to expand on ways to save, I aim to focus specifically on pharmaceutical efforts for cost reduction. Hopefully, the approach of evaluating feed costs, medicinal costs and overall pig health can be the solution to the most cost-effective treatment plans.
Cheaper on paper
I often see producers lean towards a feed medication, especially in grow-finish, as the math looks cheaper per pig. However, in my experience, those tend to stay in there longer than they should, and you are treating all the pigs. If we can move to a more targeted approach, we can utilize fewer products and save on dollars in medication costs. Many premium antibiotics have come down in price and are very manageable to use very targeted drugs in the right place and at the right time.
In the last five years, I have been impressed with the focus on antibiotic stewardship. There has been a shift towards injectables and water medications rather than feed interventions. Some nursery pigs may not see any antibiotics in the feed after their first few weeks, but they get water medications and spot treatments depending on their environment and what they are coming from in the sow farm.
The other side of that coin is the focus on some flow-specific situations, rather than whole operation protocols. With a wide range of situations that the piglets face — from what the sow farm had, how close other barns are, biosecurity ranges, historical flow challenges, and more — the protocol shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach.
Technologies to get ahead
Very early intervention can minimize the level of impact a disease has in your barn — and on your bottom line. Often, there are small signs even before clear clinical signs start with the pigs lowering their water or feed intake. Sometimes, these can be caught by the teams in the barn, but we know that labor continues to be a challenge industry-wide.
As we continue to work diligently to train and grow our workforce, there are supporting technologies emerging as well. From AI visual monitoring to smart feeders, there will continue to be new and advanced options to help manage your barns. As labor continues to be stretched thinner, that could help with efficiencies and health monitoring — feeding info to the teams to help best leverage your people. Labor is always going to be an uphill battle, so how can you put your people at pivotal moments, and allow technology to support some of the smaller, tedious tasks?
This equipment might also be the most beneficial in some of your problematic flows, in those that continuously have disease pressure, or maybe in highly pig-dense areas. The cost may balance out better for the investment than in some of your healthier herds making the upfront cost hard to justify. As this sector continues to grow, the cost will continue to go down, and more options will help make implementation more manageable.
Taking a close look
I recommend that all programs continuously evaluate what they are doing — what medications or vaccines are you using, and why did that product get placed? Ask yourself, what is necessary? What has been in for a long time? Are we still dealing with that challenge? Often during these reevaluations, I see hesitancy on the producers’ side as they don’t want to change anything. Especially when things are going well and they have a good, healthy flow of pigs.
That’s why this process has to be inclusive of the people who are directly interacting with the animals, especially the barn teams, to provide perspective with the producers and veterinarians. What issues are they seeing in the barn? What issues have been cleaned up? You also don’t have to pull it from the whole program immediately, especially with some more broad-spectrum products, it can be wise to pull it from a group or two and see the effect first. A continuous evaluation of the value that the product is bringing.
Final thoughts
Keep evaluating. Keep questioning. Keep searching for options and new ideas. It can be really easy to get comfortable with how things are going, or accept certain metrics as “normal.” Just because it is common, doesn’t mean it’s normal. Continue to challenge yourself, and your operation to find areas of improvement, and then find the right partner or option to help you improve and meet your goals.
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