Although Farm Health Guardian just launched the Protocol Farm Visits app earlier this year, Erin Hoit, biosecurity officer at Tosh Farms, has been trialing the app for the past two years. This new tool designed to make on-farm biosecurity faster, easier and more consistent for farm workers and operations of all sizes, is one that has helped her company make noticeable progress.
“It has given me great insight on how our company, as a whole, is lacking in some areas on upholding biosecurity protocols,” Hoit says.
The Protocol Farm Visits app streamlines biosecurity by providing instant access to key property information, visit records, health status, downtime, pyramid and other biosecurity requirements. She says the app makes it easy for farm workers to know and follow biosecurity requirements for any property within their system by automatically confirming whether a user meets biosecurity requirements based on their previously recorded visits.
“Biosecurity compliance is critical, but it shouldn’t be complicated,” points out Rob Hannam, CEO of Farm Health Guardian. “The Protocol Farm Visits app was built to take the guesswork out of meeting downtime and other biosecurity requirements, saving time and reducing the risk of disease transmission.”
Hidden Risks of Disease Transmission
One of the challenges with biosecurity is that there are so many risks that farms face every day that can ultimately cause a major disruption in the pork industry.
“It’s like a chain effect so to speak,” Hoit says. “If one link is broken, it eventually causes everything else to go south.”
Through research and trials with customers, Hannam says they have discovered actual biosecurity compliance isn’t as good as people think it is.
“There are many more breaches, both with people biosecurity and with transport biosecurity, than we think is happening,” he says. “This new mobile application should make it easier for workers, contractors and visitors to know and follow biosecurity protocols.”
Elvin Garcia, manager of biosecurity for HyLife in Canada, began a pilot project in the fall of 2021 using the app and fully implemented it across the company by the spring of 2022. He likes how the app provides real-time visibility by using geofencing and GPS integration to automatically track all personnel and vehicle movements across HyLife farms and other vital properties, ensuring every visit is recorded and protocol compliant.
“In the event of a suspected outbreak, the app provides an immediate ‘audit trail,’” Garcia says. “Instead of spending days calling different people and looking at visitors logs to trace movements, you can instantly generate a report showing every person and vehicle that visited the affected site and where they went afterward, allowing for rapid biocontainment of the virus.”
Slowing Down Disease Spread
The Protocol Farm Visits app simplifies managing people movements according to health status and other requirements, which is critical when it comes to protecting animal health and preventing disease spread.
Tara Prezioso, DVM, University of Illinois Department of Pathobiology, says, “Monitoring human movement is just as or more important than monitoring animal movement alone.”
Hoit appreciates how the app helps people organize their days and gives them a basic insight on farms that are needing extra attention and ones that do not.
“This keeps pathogens from spreading to a minimum, so we’re not creating an even bigger catastrophe,” Hoit says.
For example, they experienced a porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) outbreak at one of their sow farms that was contracted from a neighboring barn (not theirs).
“This app helped people plan their days out better, which slowed down the spread of disease tremendously,” she says.
How Does the App Work?
A key feature of the new app is a link to Google Maps for any farm property within a system, making it easier to navigate directly to a farm location. The app also includes pertinent property information such as key contacts.
“The whole system is available on desktop as well as the app,” Hannam says. “Typically, the biosecurity manager, veterinarian and owner prefer working on the desktop version. If they need to change a farm’s health status in the app, they go into that farm, choose health status edit, drop down to the health status that’s changed, and hit save. It’s pretty simple.”
The new app replaces the original Farm Health Guardian app and is ideal for farms that are committed to enhancing their biosecurity practices. As disease pressure increases, Hannam says biosecurity protocols are one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce disease risk.
“We focus on reducing the risk of people or vehicles inadvertently transferring disease among properties in that system,” Hannam says. “These systems already have biosecurity protocols. Now they can know whether the people and the trucks are following the rules that they’ve set for themselves. It gives us a way to manage it. It’s a tool that managers haven’t had before to be able to improve and reduce that risk.”
For Garcia, this app has been extremely useful for disease investigation and movement auditing.
“The main advantage of implementing a digital system like Protocol Farm Visits App is that it moves a farm from a ‘reactive’ biosecurity stance to a ‘proactive’ by closing the gaps that manual processes simply can’t bridge,” Garcia says.
