Adequate. Mediocre. Tolerable. These are not adjectives we want to use to describe the standards we have for aspects of our business. So why would we ever accept these terms when it comes to the standards we have for pig health? Maybe we don’t think of having standards for health. Or maybe we don’t have the right vision of where our standards should be. Let’s take a little deeper look and evaluate how we think about swine health standards.
Defining our standards does not need to be complicated. Here are three key components that are integral to systems that have high standards of health:
- Sow farm health/wean pig health
- System design
- Biosecurity
Boiled down, this simply asks: What is the pig’s potential? Is the system built to reach that potential? Can we protect its health so it can thrive?
Wean Pig Health Starts at the Sow Farm
Starting with sow farm health, this is arguably the easiest place to define a standard. Over time, that standard has evolved as we’ve gained more information and improved our health management strategies. For a while, being PRRS-negative was the benchmark—and not much more. With what we know today, it’s time to set a higher standard for the health of the pigs we choose to raise.
The data is clear—starting with a pig that is not only PRRS-negative but also negative for Mycoplasma and Influenza, and free from specific bacterial pressures, offers significant biological and economic advantages. Add to that a later weaning age—24 days—and you’ve got a pig set up for success. If we want to run more productive and more profitable farms, it’s time to raise our standards.
Your System Design
Next, we look at system design. To maximize the potential of our pigs, the system must be built to minimize the impact of health challenges. This is often the hardest area to define standards—most systems aren’t built from scratch. They’re pieced together over time and are constantly a work in progress. It’s great to have goals for what our system would look like if we were starting from a blank canvas. The key is to pull the most critical elements from that ideal design and establish them as our must-have standards.
To reach their full potential, farms need systems designed for all-in, all-out flow with single-age groups on site. This setup offers the best opportunity to manage and reduce disease transmission between groups. This often can mean evaluating:
- Size of your sow farm relative to the size of your wean-to-market sites
- Total turn time of your system from the first delivery to the last market pig sale
- Total wean-to-market spaces in your system
- Size of your wean-to-market sites
- Management, feeders, nutrition, ventilation, etc., that influence pig performance
There are many elements we can evaluate, but this is a great place to start and commit to as a standard for your system design.
Commit to Biosecurity
Finally, we must protect the health we’ve invested in—and that comes down to biosecurity and keeping disease out.
In general, biosecurity standards in our wean-to-market systems are lacking. Too often, we rely on general practices or a loose understanding of what we should be doing, without committing to real, enforceable standards. Yes, biosecurity is a complex topic with many moving parts—more than we can cover here—but that doesn’t make it optional.
What we can do is commit to making biosecurity evaluation a standard. That means taking a hard look at our systems and creating clear, enforceable rules that we’ll live by, day in and day out. Often, an outside evaluation can expose simple opportunities to teach, implement, and improve.
Making that outside review—and the commitment to wean-to-market biosecurity—a standard for every operation is a step we can’t afford to skip.
High standards drive us forward, helping us achieve our full potential. This is especially true in pig production and pig health. Farmers should regularly evaluate the health standards on their farms and ask themselves—is it time to raise the bar?
