A Veterinarian with Carthage Veterinary Services says a farm operation’s potential for success under a Raised Without Antibiotics program will depend very much on factors such as management and health status.
Raised Without Antibiotics programs are providing new opportunities for livestock operations to capture premiums within the market.
Dr. Clayton Johnson, the Director of Health Carthage System with Carthage Veterinary Services, says a combination of factors will need to be considered when deciding whether or not RWA is the right choice.
The changing cost of production and your change in revenues based on how much you’re getting paid per hundredweight is really going to drive whether that program is for you or not. Each producer has a different economic situation. Each producer is going to see different impacts from going to an RWA program. They’re going to get a different revenue, depending on what program they’re in and they’re going to have a different cost of production change depending on their health status, their barn environments, their management strategies.
There’s a whole host of factors that you have to consider to determine is an RWA program right for you and more profitable for your farm operation. I think the health status is king and your health status really starts with biosecurity. If you don’t have good biosecurity and you can’t prevent new disease introductions into your farm, you can’t control your own health status.
We may be able to eliminate some disease organisms on the farm today but, if we can’t keep them out we really probably aren’t in a good shape to participate in an RWA program. If you’ve got good biosecurity and that would be measured generally by the number of disease outbreaks you have over a period of time so, if you don’t have very many disease outbreaks or ideally none at all and you’ve eliminated some of the common pathogens that can be eliminated like PED, PRRS, Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae, if you’ve eliminated those pathogens, you’re generally going to be a pretty good candidate for an RWA program.
~ Dr. Clayton Johnson, Carthage Veterinary Services
Dr. Clayton Johnson says, in some case, operators have withdrawn from Raised Without Antibiotics programs because they weren’t able to cope with the disease issue.
