Farmscape for October 17, 2014

The chair of Sask Pork says the ability to keep PED out of Saskatchewan swine herds is important for the economic well being of the farm and the morale of staff that work with the pigs.
The latest on efforts to control the spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea will be among the topics discussed next month as part of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2014 in Saskatoon.
Saskatchewan Pork Development Board chair Florian Possberg, who will participate in an industry round table examining challenges and opportunities for western Canada's pork industry, says it's really tough to watch animals suffer and die, so keeping this disease out is not only economically beneficial, it's beneficial for morale as well.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
Typically for naive sow herds farrowing pigs, almost all of the pigs that are under two weeks of age in the farrowing rooms will invariably die and there isn't a darn thing the people can do, the staff can do to mitigate that.
All they can do is do a number of techniques to increase the level of immunity in the herd to have immunity and therefore the disease go away as quickly as possible.
I've been told from a number of people working in these operations that have went through an active infection it's likely the toughest thing they've ever had to deal with, watching these animals dehydrate and die.
So obviously if we can prevent this from getting into our region it's very beneficial because then we don't have to go through these issues.

Possberg says we've been able to identify the few cases we've had in Canada and more importantly we've been able to control the spread of the infection and in a lot of instances turn positive cases back to negative.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane,

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council