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)