One worrisome disease vector this time of year is migratory birds, however one of the biggest deterrents farms can use comes from the world of used cars.
No matter what season it is, the main elements driving pig production always come back to your herd’s environment, water and feed. In addition to your daily and weekly checks and chores in the barn, spring and fall are two excellent times to conduct a larger review of everything you’re doing on the farm to support all the moving parts, as you and your pigs head into more extreme weather.
Here at Professional Swine Management, each farm and production manager is given 45 days to complete a summer-prep checklist with the farm workers at their individual sites each year (same with winter-prep in the fall). The summer checklists are due by May 15.
Among the many items under review are things such as checking generators for repairs and preventive maintenance; inspecting outdoor watering systems and preparing them to turn back on after a long winter shutoff; and making sure the barn cool cells are ready to deploy. Carthage System Director of Health, Dyneah Classen, DVM, notes these cells are particularly important in keeping the barns cool and, in fact, may make a difference of as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit on a steaming summer day.
“Part of your spring prep is to make sure those are up and running before you need them,” she explained. “See that any water lines that broke in winter are replaced, replace other worn parts, run disinfectant or algaecide through the cells, check there are no holes in the pads and do a test run on the cool cells before you’ll need them on the hotter days.”
Another good point Classen makes is to check your facility’s fans and ventilation are ready to go — again, well before the hottest days. We know pigs can’t sweat to cool off, so using misters and dippers helps simulate that process by coating them in cool water that evaporates to take some heat off their skin. Smooth-running ventilation and fans provide that cross breeze that dries the animals more quickly.
Pig Care 101 tells us to make available plenty of cool water for every animal in these coming hotter months. Classen also reminds producers to monitor pigs for respiration, and that if their panting becomes too labored — or worse, stops in high temperatures — to take immediate steps to better cool them off.
This has impacts on transport of animals in the summer, as well. Since the goal is to deliver healthy pigs with no mortalities, it’s important to minimize the heat to which they are subjected when riding in a semi trailer:
Try to load the truck during cooler parts of the day when the forecast is hot and humid, beginning earlier in the morning or waiting until evening (if driving overnight).
Speaking of overnight — if it’s possible to transport during these hours, it does remove direct sunlight as your main element of exacerbating the heat.
Wet down bedding or shavings inside the trailer to help cool the environment.
Pigs should not be sprayed directly with cold water when heat-stressed. This will cause a shock to the pigs system and can result in death.
Drivers should be instructed to keep the truck moving as much as possible until the pigs are unloaded — if they cannot unload immediately at their destination, drive around the block or down the road and back until they can, since a still trailer with no breeze or airflow is a hot trailer.
This also applies to the drive itself — ask your driver to plan routes that take them around construction and metro-area traffic jams as much as possible (again, driving at night may help with some of this, on top of cooler temperatures).
Our farms do make dietary changes for the pigs in the summer, as well. While there’s little change in the gestation diet for sows, we increase energy and lysine components in lactation diets around the first of May to ensure every sow that will be farrowing has the nutrition to handle such stressful activity — and because, like other pigs, sows tend to consume less feed as it grows hotter. For the same reason, we also boost the energy in nursery and grow-finish diets in the summer.
Classen points out the importance of making sure plenty of feed is available when pigs are actually inclined to eat, typically when it cools off later in the day and during the night.
“We once put a data logger in a trailer that was moving in minus-20-degree weather,” Classen noted, “and we found that the interior of that trailer got up to 20 degrees in direct sunlight. Now that’s not warm in the winter, but think about what a 40-degree difference does in the summer.”
One of the preventives we emphasize going into summer is maintaining rodent bait boxes. During the winter they can be moved and damaged by raccoons and other wildlife, so this time of year they are moved back into place, replaced if needed and checked weekly. Another worrisome disease vector are migratory birds, which have been returning to the Midwest over the past few weeks. They are especially attracted to on-farm compost.
Believe it or not, one of the biggest deterrents to birds comes from the world of used cars. I always thought the colorful waving “tube men” put up to flutter at automotive dealerships was some industry-specific gimmick, until I learned they scare off birds that would otherwise leave droppings on shiny cars. So, we tried this at our farms — turns out birds don’t like these “dancing men” there, either!
There are other steps you can take to lessen the incidence and impact of disease. Classen advises making sure animals are caught up, particularly on season-specific vaccines — it’s maddening to lose pigs to a bacterial infection that could have been avoided or at least curbed better with a comparatively inexpensive vaccine. She also says while producers tend to think of certain infections as “winter,” such as influenza, deltacoronavirus, porcine epidemic diarrhea and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, she has seen a lessening in the seasonality of these over her years of practice.
In other words, under the right conditions, these viruses can definitely infect a herd in the summer, too.
Just like pigs, the hotter it is, the more water humans need to consume. One of the simplest things we do to try to make PSM farm workers more comfortable in the summer is make cold drinks available at all times. Our safety team also monitors weather and temperature forecasts and sends out reminders on the most hot or humid days for how to beat the heat, and allows flex-hours so people can instead work earlier to load trucks or later at night to sprinkle water over sows (which is all right to do in cooler conditions than a hot trailer or direct sunlight), for example.
Summer is our most important time of year, as it is when pigs are worth the most. Pig prices tend to go up in June and fall off in the autumn. We take preparing our facilities and sows in advance seriously, from barn and grounds care to plotting our feed formulations and bin maintenance, in order to supply feed at peak eating times in sufficient quantities and with the right nutritional energy.
We also consult historical data for each farm to set production and maintenance targets, rather than using a cookie-cutter approach to all. The needs of one will not be exactly the needs of another. Your operation, too, has its own requirements and history that you can use alongside this expert advice to prepare your own “summer is coming” checklist for pig care and production.
Live Link: Don’t wait until summer to prep for hot-weather swine care
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Finding the right balance between taking beneficial preventative measures and not spending an over-budgeted amount on pharmaceuticals
As a pork producer, you can’t personally control how far north the New World screwworm advances, but you can protect your own operations and interests as much as possible.
Finding the right balance between taking beneficial preventative measures and not spending an over-budgeted amount on pharmaceuticals
Finding the right balance between taking beneficial preventative measures and not spending an over-budgeted amount on pharmaceuticals
Finding the right balance between taking beneficial preventative measures and not spending an over-budgeted amount on pharmaceuticals
Finding the right balance between taking beneficial preventative measures and not spending an over-budgeted amount on pharmaceuticals
Finding the right balance between taking beneficial preventative measures and not spending an over-budgeted amount on pharmaceuticals
Dustin Coleman raises wean pigs under contract on his farm in Missouri.
Producers are extremely good at several things: working hard, caring for their animals, and planning.
