Good Production Practice: Using Antibiotics Responsibly

(New Barn Progress- pouring the floor)

In my last post on good production practices, I went into how our farm uses antibiotics to treat pigs when they are sick.  Antibiotics are part of how we take care of our animals.  However, that isn't the only way that we mange our hog health.  There are 5 areas we look at to responsibly manage our antibiotic use.  These steps will change in the coming years, as regulation changes.

First, we do what we can to use less antibiotics.  This means cleaning boots, clothes, and gloves.  We don't want to wear a pair of boots with one group of animals, and then drive over to another group and spread bacteria from the first group.  We also clean and disinfect barns and trucks between groups of pigs.  If I am going to see pigs in the same barn, I start with the youngest ones first, so I don't track bugs from the oldest pigs down to the youngest ones.

Next, when a pig gets sick we treat it.  After it is treated, we look to see if there is any interference that is causing the sickness.  Did the barn get to warm and muggy? Did some of the bird netting at the top of the barn come down, and allow the birds and pigs to have contact?  Did the pigs run out of feed or water for part of a day?  Is something in the barn broken? In a perfect world, none of these things happen, but in reality, little problems occur all of the time.  Once we identify the cause of the sickness, we can be a lot more proactive in preventing it.

When deciding whether or not to use an antibiotic, we have to see if it makes sense.  For example. a virus like PEDv wouldn't respond to an antibiotic treatment.  Trying to treat it with an antibiotic would be throwing money away.  When choosing to use an antibiotic, we have to make sure there is a measurable gain- this can be less pigs die from a disease, or improved performance, at such a rate that it justifies the cost of the drug.

As you probably know, most our pigs are raised from 60 lbs. to market weight in an Amish barn.  If a pig is starting to show signs of getting sick, the Amish barn manager has to make a decision on what to do.  All of the barn managers are trained at the company, state, and industry levels on how to handle antibiotics.  They are provided with information on storage, dosage, length of use, withdrawal times, and on how to keep accurate treatment records for best traceability.

What our barn managers aren't doing is diagnosing illnesses.  We leave that to the universities and veterinarians.  By working with our vets and diagnostic labs, we can make the most informed decisions on how to best care for our animals.  Sometimes a barn will be diagnosed with a disease in a few pigs that never really breaks into the whole barn. The manager will store the antibiotics until they need them for another outbreak, (returning them would violate our cleaning standards) or if we do not need them again and they expire, we will dispose of them per our vet's guidelines.

These five areas help us to manage our herd health responsibly.  In five years, I know that these guidelines will change due to changing consumer preferences on antibiotic use in production agriculture, and that doesn't really bother me.  I try to do the best I can with the tools I have, however, if I ignore alternatives to antibiotics, or consumer preferences, the farm will not make it very far.  Moving forward, we have to look at what opportunities are out there to make pork production better- for the people and the pigs.