Ag News for America
At the Novartis Animal Health booth at World Pork Expo, we visited with swine veterinary advisor Dr. Keith Erlandson about ways to improve herd health—specifically, how Novartis helps producers recognize diseases within their herd, and then helps them develop optimal strategies to improve the health of their herd and the performance of their pigs.
AUDIO: Keith Erlandson (1:30 MP3)
Jesse McCoy demonstrates the new pump.
Boehringer Ingelheim and Ivesco Technical Services have developed a peristaltic pump specifically designed to administer oral vaccines for six hours.
According to Jess McCoy, water quality manager with Ivesco, the pump makes an easy process even easier by allowing for a consistent release of solution into a water line over a set period of time. McCoy says it eliminates the need to pre-measure stock solution and assures vaccination accuracy.
Brownfield visited with McCoy at the World Pork Expo trade show.
Dr. John Waddell of Boehringer Ingelheim talks about the company’s oral vaccines and how the pump simplifies the process of the administering those products.
One of the exhibitors at this year’s World Pork Expo trade show was Al Larson of PitCharger. According to Larson, PitCharger helps pork producers address manure management challenges, including solids liquefication, crusting and flies, odor control and the feeding of DDGS. We visited with Larson about PitCharger and the increasing value of the manure produced by hogs.
John Waddell
Swine influenza virus (SIV) continues to be a frustrating issue for pork producers and their veterinarians. In this interview with Brownfield at World Pork Expo, Dr. John Waddell of Boehringer Ingelheim talks about the challenges surrounding SIV and discusses research on a new modified live vaccine that provides a glimmer of hope for the future.
Ernest Keith
We stopped by the Lallemand booth at World Pork Expo and visited with Ernest Keith, monograstric product manager with Lallemand, about their Levucell SB product. It’s a natural live yeast that Keith says improves intestinal transit and farrowing conditions for sows and improves piglet vitality.
Like many pork producers attending World Pork Expo, Larry Sailer of Iowa Falls, Iowa has questions and some concerns about the proposed sale of Smithfield Foods to a Chinese company.
“My biggest concern is just what kinds of regulations and stipulations a foreign company can put on us as far as producers here in this country,” Sailer says. “Are some of us going to get left out? Are they going to have their own producers—just how it’s all going to work?”
Dr. Jamie Lehman
In an interview with Brownfield at World Pork Expo, Dr. Jamie Lehman, swine technical services manager with Merck Animal Health, discussed ways that Merck is helping producers address the challenge of female non-productive days.
“We don’t want animals on the farm that are eating, tying up space and not having productive days,” Lehman says. “Our goal is to get the sows back on cycle and get them bred so the farms can have a productive cycle out of that animal.”
AUDIO: Jamie Lehman (2:02 MP3)
Dr. Howard Hill
“Unfortunately, the scope of PEDV seems to be getting bigger.”
That’s the word from Dr. Howard Hill of Iowa Select Farms, a veterinarian who is president-elect of the National Pork Producers Council. Hill says that, officially, there are 103 confirmed cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus covering eight states–although he suspects the spread of the disease is even more widespread than that. And he says additional outbreaks are still occurring.
Hill gave us an update on PEDV on Thursday morning at World Pork Expo.
Environmental groups, public-health groups and others opposed to the use of antibiotics in livestock production continue to push for tighter restrictions on the use of those products.
The most recent development is a ruling by a federal judge in New York, who found that the FDA behaved in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when it dismissed two citizens’ petitions that asked the agency to consider banning farmers from using antibiotics on livestock for non-therapeutic uses.
The FDA had rejected the two petitions – filed in 1999 and in 2005 – because of the time and expense to hold formal withdrawal proceedings.
The ruling adds fuel an intensifying legal war over the future use of antibiotics to promote animal growth, increase feed efficiency and disease prevention on food-producing livestock.
At a news conference during World Pork Expo in Des Moines last week, the chief veterinarian of the National Pork Producers Council, Dr. Liz Wagstrom, talked about what that ruling means. She was joined by Michigan pork producer Bob Dykhuis, a member of the NPPC board who has also been very involved with the antibiotics issue.
Dykhuis discussed the issues surrounding FDA’s Guidance 209 and Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) and talked about the changes that are coming to the pork industry as far as accessing and using antibiotics over the next three to five years.
AUDIO: NPPC news conference–Wagstrom, Dykhuis (13:14 MP3)
A survey of larger pork operations, commissioned by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), shows that—currently—only 17 percent of sows spend a portion of gestation in open pens.
Producers surveyed indicated that number will climb to 24 percent in the next couple of years.
NPPC says the findings confirm the group’s concerns about recent pronouncements by food companies that they will use only pork from operations that are gestation-stall free.
“This survey shows that these food companies obviously haven’t thought through the complexities, logistics or implications of their requests,” said NPPC President R.C. Hunt, a pork producer from Wilson, North Carolina. “Simply making an announcement without understanding the entire supply chain’s ability to meet these requests or the challenges involved is utterly befuddling. We feel it is important to have this first-hand information available to our customers.”
The survey was conducted by University of Missouri livestock marketing economist Dr. Ron Plain, who shared his thoughts with Brownfield in an interview at World Pork Expo in Des Moines.
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