Farm Update: Planting Season

Hello all, things are back to busy as usual on the farm.  We have started field work for the spring!  So far we have done our tillage, manure hauling and started on the planting.  Our early field work was delayed by a cold spring, so we were more anxious than usual to get things rolling, but we have caught up now, and are moving strong.  The unfortunate thing about catching up means that it hasn't rained much lately, which is leaving our ground moisture lower than it normally is for the spring.  This could hurt things later on, but we will just have to wait and see.

(Hauling Manure)

After a hard winter, we are starting to come out of PRRS.  Our farrowing farms (the ones where the babies are born) are running well again, with the sows finally staying bred.  We didn't know when this would happen, so for a little while we have more baby pigs that usual.  That's not a bad thing after such a low time, but it takes more management to keep the pigs on their moms as long as possible, while creating space for new litters to be born.  In our nurseries and finishers, we aren't losing too many pigs, although it is still a little higher than we normally see.  The main difference in these pigs is that they don't grow as nice and even as they did before our outbreak.  This leads to challenges in adjusting the ventilation, water, and feed to fit a large range of pig needs in each group, where usually the pigs in a group are pretty uniform and ready for the same stage at the same time.

Good news moving forward is the piglets being born are consistently born negative for PRRS, which means our sows (mom pigs) are no longer actively shedding virus.  Since we have the sows in stable condition, we are moving to phase two of PRRS clean-up.  This second phase is to get the pigs going into our nurseries (21 days old) to be negative once they are off of mom.  As of our last test some pigs are and some aren't, so the positive pigs infect their peers when they are all grouped together, causing the virus to keep circulating.  We think this is happening because we sometimes mix older pigs and younger pigs in the farrowing house, in order to help the slower growers or runts get a better start.  We also "foster" pigs that can cause spread of the virus: fostering is taking babies off of a sow that has too many (maybe 17 babies, but only 12 working nipples) and put them on a sow who didn't have very many (maybe only 5, but has 12 working nipples).  This way all of the pigs have a better chance for survival, and the sow with only a few pigs produces more milk, which will help her to raise her next litter.

With phase two of PRRS clean-up we will keep all pigs that are born in the same week together, no late fostering (we still can foster within the first day or two after birth), and no holding runts back in the farrowing house.  We will dedicate nursery space specifically for the smallest pigs, so they get more intensive care (this part is usually handled at the farrowing farm instead of at the nursery).  We will also make sure to disinfect everything we use in the farrowing house between litters, where usually we disinfect each day.  This should stop the spread of the virus between little pigs within 3-4 months, baring a re-break of the sows.  It will be a lot of extra work, but it is worth it to get healthy pigs.  If we can successfully make it through phase two, we can start to work towards getting our herd PRRS naive, which is no virus on the farm anywhere.  We still have a long way to go, but things are looking up!