Raising pigs should be fairly easy, said Clayton Johnson, partner and veterinarian at Carthage Veterinary Service. After all, the strategy for pig production is pretty simple.
“We take the ingredients – a high-quality wean pig that’s not coughing and that’s the right weight – then we take grains, a barn and we make a market pig. The strategy is fairly straightforward. The execution should be, too,” Johnson said.
But we have to call out our challenges, he said during the 2022 Carthage Swine Conference. How do producers manage execution and sustainability in a world of distractions?
“Our world is non-stop distractions, whether it’s Twitter or email or text or TikTok, it is just all around us all the time. The sky is always falling. If it’s not COVID, it’s monkeypox. If it’s not PRRS, it’s something else,” Johnson said.
“Focus on what you can control right now to make your farm better,” Johnson said.
That’s why pork producers must focus on what they can control and work to shut out the distractions that they can’t control. Even though topics like plant-based meat, inflation, recession and labor continue to be discussed at great length, he quickly pointed out that getting clouded by these distractions only sets us up for discouragement.
“We have all these headwinds ahead of us. But I think it’s important we stay focused when we’re talking about raising pigs,” Johnson said. “We put together a plan for the farm, and then we farm the plan.”
Producers need to focus on the real distractions on the farm that they can improve to make their operation succeed. He shared five things producers need to focus on.
1. PRRS and PED
Diseases like porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) and porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) will cripple any farm. The best pig farms in the world can’t survive those horrific diseases, Johnson said. As long as diseases like PRRS and PED find their way into the farm, the farm is going to be remain in that bottom quartile of producers.
“We owe it to our farms to try and set them up with success and biosecurity,” he said. “We owe it to the people in our barns – the ones who get up at 5 a.m. every day to come to work in the snow, rain, sunshine, kids’ first day of school, you name it – not to have to deal with that.”
2. E. coli
E. coli was an issue Johnson spent a lot of time dealing with early in his career. He said it was a unique disease that was a problem post weaning for some producers in some regions, but it certainly wasn’t a problem for everybody.
“About a year ago, something switched,” Johnson said. “There is not much more demoralizing to a team of folks taking care of nursery pigs or wean-to-finish pigs than walking into a barn full of 5,000 or 10,000 scouring pigs. That disease is an uphill battle.”
3. Sow mortality
Sow mortality may not be the physical problem it used to be for a lot of farms, he said, as there are now mechanized ways to remove the sows from the building. However, even with that mechanization, it still takes a lot of time and labor. When your staff is preoccupied with removing dead sows, they can’t focus as much time and energy on things like day one care. Moving the needle to lessen sow mortality on your farm is important for employee wellbeing, too.
4. Staffing Challenges
Johnson said the most common ‘oh crap moment’ he hears when he gets to a farm revolves around staffing challenges and farms being down X number of workers that day. That’s when he switches from adding value to his visit to helping prioritize what must be done that day.
“If we have 80% of the labor to do the job, we’re going to get 80% of the job done. We can all talk about how to give 110%, but that is a fool’s errand. There is no such thing as 110%. Maybe somebody can stay a little late today, but that cannot be your long-term plan,” he said.
The best people working on the farm will always be the first ones to get burnt out, Johnson added.
5. Inaccurate Data Collection and Corrections
“If I spend an hour and a half in the office, arguing over what the actual mortality is, or what the med cost is, that is wasted time,” Johnson said. “We’re not working at solving anything. We’re working on aligning on what the problem is.”
If you have bad data, it makes it impossible to make progress on a farm. Obtain good information and minimize the amount of time you spend on corrections. Start doing mobile entry, especially on the sow side, so those corrections automatically pop up when you’re entering the data. He said it’s not just about collecting data faster but collecting higher quality data that actually helps make decisions.
Despite these challenges at hand, Johnson said, “Don’t agonize, organize.” Focus on what you’re doing, saying and thinking right now.
“You can’t control what you’re going to do tomorrow. You certainly can’t control what you did yesterday,” he added. “Focus on what you can control right now to make your farm better.”
More from Farm Journal’s PORK:
Top Things People Said at the 2022 Carthage Swine Conference
Proposition 12 Compliancy: Don’t Do It for Free, Hollis Says
