Manitoba Pork Council is encouraging pork producers to step up their vigilance in ensuring the trucks that haul hogs from their farms do not bring in disease.
Manitoba Pork Council receives reports almost weekly of disease outbreaks in various markets for Manitoba pigs and is stressing the importance of ensuring trucks that have been at gathering yards, packing plants or other farms in the U.S. or Canada have been cleaned.
Quality assurance and labor programs manager Miles Beaudin says producers are generally very good at maintaining proper biosecurity on farm sites but it’s especially important to be diligent about biosecurity before, during and after transport and producers and transporters must depend on each other to be equally diligent.
Anytime your introduce a new disease into a herd you cause financial loss.
It’s that simple.
The U.S. has several diseases that Manitoba farmers do not have.
As such we must not bring these diseases back into Manitoba.
Transporters who deliver market hogs, feeder hogs, isoweans or sows to the U.S. slaughter plants or to U.S. farms are only required by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to scrape their trucks when coming back into Canada.
Most commercial transporters who ship pigs to the U.S. will return back to Canadian gathering yards unwashed so this is a big concern.
Some of these trucks then go to a Canadian packer.
As such everybody who delivers pigs to a gathering yard or Canadian packer is at great risk of getting a disease that may have originated in the U.S.
Beaudin says when producers hire transporters they need to specify that trucks must be cleaned and disinfected before coming to the farm and they should ask what steps have been taken to clean the truck, with what products and how long ago the truck was last used and where.
He stresses, once you introduce a new disease into your farm, it’s very difficult to return to the same herd health status you had before.
For Farmscape.Ca
