PRRS Update- Month 3

For those who have been following our farm's journey through PRRS, we are slowly making progress (to catch up if you haven't, check out my earlier posts here and here.  Three months in from our initial diagnosis, we are starting to see all of the pigs being born looking better.  Production isn't back up to where it was before, but slowly we are making progress.

At this point we are moving forward with our disease management techniques.  First, we are giving all of the breeding herd a serum that is made from PRRS virus collected from our herd.  This is to reinvigorate their immunity towards the disease.  We will do this every 3-6 months until we decided to fully eliminate PRRS on the farm.  This strategy is a little bit of a different method for handling the disease; instead of using the commercial vaccine we have created our own serum that comes exactly from our PRRS mutation. Our vet believes this is a better strategy long term, since it should give us better immunity than a vaccine which may not work fully if our virus has mutated.

Last week we tested Green Valley, the first farm that broke with the disease, to see if we were getting PRRS negative piglets yet.  The good news is that we are!  We will test at least one more time and look for more negative results before deciding to try to eliminate the disease from those pigs long-term.  This will be tricky if our other farms are still positive, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. Next week we will have pigs tested for PRRS at River Ridge to see if they will also be negative.  We have heard that other farms are having trouble shaking this strain, so we realize we might have a few more positive tests before we can start clean up.

(beautiful spring-like day on the farm)

New Year, New Barn

Happy New Year!  Just before the new year, we had some big excitement on the farm... the new barn is up and running! After a year of planning, weather, and building, we have all of the pigs inside.   The move didn't come a moment too soon because when the hole for the barn was dug some of the outside heater lines for the waterers were severed, so with below freezing temperatures it would have been difficult to keep some of the pens from freezing up.

(Mandie moving the last of the pigs inside)

So far, the crew likes the new barn, although as with anything new we are still figuring out the quirks.  The pigs are much more comfortable around people, since they have more human interaction.  We are able to feed them better to their needs, since we look at the pigs everyday.  On our farm we don't often see skinny animals; more often its a problem of overfeeding, so having the pigs inside we can monitor their intake a little more, keeping them at a healthier weight.  The crew has also noticed that we find at-risk animals sooner, so we are better able to help them.  Hopefully, as we get used to the new set-up we can offer better care to all of the pigs on the farm, including the newborn piglets who should get more attention when we aren't moving groups of pigs a mile or two per day.  

For anyone who is curious:  the "paint" on the pigs is a livestock marker, which is water based.  We put it on the pigs when we need to identify a group specifically.  In this case, the green pigs are bred to Landrace boars, and the pink pigs are bred to Large White boars.  It is painless identification for the pig, and a good visual for the people.   

With the last four months being pretty tough around here, we are excited to get something positive going for us.  It's a good start to 2016.