MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

Everyone, welcome to the Michigan Ag Ideas to Grow With virtual conference. My name is Beth Ferry and I am a pork educator based down in Berrien County. It is my pleasure to welcome you to this session today where Dr. Dave Thompson and myself will be discussing basic care for pigs. Please note we are recording this session as well as attempting to live stream it on Facebook through the Michigan Pork Producers Association. Before we get started, I do want to thank our sponsors. We do have slides that were shown when we first started the meeting with their names on them. But we also want to make sure that we credit Michigan Pork Producers Association who is sponsoring this specific session and also allowing us to use their Facebook to do a live event, to hopefully have outreach to more producers. You'll be able to check out the Michigan Ag Ideas to Grow website for the recording of this presentation and others, if you'd like to join those throughout the week, we still have more sessions coming each day and the email schedule that you did receive will have the links to all of those. Before we get started, we do have a quick farm safety video that we would like to share with everybody. So I'm going to take a minute, share my screen and let you view that. Produce safety folks often talk about not being able to sanitize dirty food contact surfaces. The same is actually true for hands. Hand sanitizer isn't a replacement for handwashing for the same reason. When I use this chocolate hazelnut spread on my hands and tried to clean them with sanitizer, all I managed to do is spread the chocolate around. This happens with feces on a microscopic level. When we only use sanitizer, we only spread germs around. Effective washing. Using soap and water for at least 20 seconds does a much better job. To help gauge the length of wash time, some folks sing the happy birthday song twice, or the alphabet song twice through to make sure they've done enough washing. As silly as it seems, effective handwashing is the single biggest way to prevent the spread of foodborne illness in produce. Doing right is the single biggest way to keep poop off food. All right, that was just a really quick short video on some of the food safety topics that we get talked about or sent daily. We have questions about those type of things. We wanted to share that with everybody here today. Next up, we are happy to have Christina Curell join us today. Christina is going to give us some quick tips on manure production, also utilization. So Christina, go ahead and take it away. Alright. Thank you. Beth and Dave, let's see. There we go. Good evening. I'm Christina Curell I'm the statewide cover crop and soil health educator, and I've been doing this, I've had that role now for nine years. And previous to that, I spent 17 years doing water quality nutrient management on a statewide basis. Sarah Fronczak is our environmental management educator and this is actually her presentation and I'm going to present it for her. She's really busy this week doing a lot of presentations and so I am helping her. And another one of our colleagues, Erika Rogers this week. So I want to give you a little overview what we're going to talk about this evening. And we're going to talk about manure production, the nutrients in the manure, some of your storage options, and some manure applications. And please feel free to put questions in the chat anytime you want. So let's talk a little bit about manure production. How much manure do you produce, and when we're thinking about how to manage manure and storage, we really need to know how much, how much do we produce on the farm? So let's think about, we're just going to look at a 250 pound pig. And how much manure does that produce in one day? Anyone have a guess? Just to think about that number and I'm going to tell you. So in one day on an average, a hog will produce about 11.48 pounds of manure, or about 1.3 to 1.4 gallons. That's how much they produce a day. Now when we look at manure planning and we look at production and storage, we don't normally talk about manure production in one day. We usually talk about it on an annual basis or even a monthly basis when we're looking at how much storage we need. So if we're looking at it on an annual basis, each hog, each 250 pound animal when this is from a wean to finish, it's going to produce about 228 gallons per per six months. So so if you sit down and figure it out, if you have how many hogs you have on your facility for six months or a year, depending on your type of system, you can actually figure out how much manure you're going to produce. And this is extremely important when you're looking at putting together a facility. So let's talk a little bit about the different types of facilities. We're going to look at two different types. So we're going to look at outdoor pen lots and we're going to look at indoor pen lots. I'm going to hit this really quick because when we're looking at an outdoor pet lot, what does it look like? You really want to make sure you have a grassy area that is surrounding your pen. And then if you've got anywhere where there's water or anywhere the water can intercept manure through your lot, you want to make sure you keep that manure or that water clean. Clean water can be diverted around. It doesn't have to be put into any storage facility. Keep your water clean and you don't have to count that into your system. Okay, Now, one of the things that I want you to consider is what if you have a large lot, it can be really, really hard to manage it. So the smaller the lot, the easier it is to keep it clean, to make sure that water stays clean and to make sure that any water is diverted around it. And if you have a large lot or even small lot, you want to scrape it regularly to keep it clean. And if you have a paved lot I'm sorry, it's a small lot. If you have a paved lot, that's really the best thing that you can do because you can really clean it easy and you can put it in a manure spreader. And yes, that is a pink manure spreader. I saw that in Kentucky and I had to grab a picture. It's the only pink when I've ever seen. So manure spreaders can come in any size or shape. Another thing you want to consider about when you're looking at indoor pen or lots, because you need to make sure that you keep the clean out, clean up the manure, and wet bedding. You want to remove it regularly so that it does stay clean so that you have less water in it. We'll talk a little bit about manure. This is swine manure. Swine manure is roughly 96% water and it's 4% solids. And that manure has nutrients that plants need. They have phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium. Now one of the things that, that we talk about is an average nutrients. Swine manure has about 34 pounds of nitrogen, 18 pounds of phosphorus, 21 pounds of potassium. But you know, one of the things that I did many, many years ago is we went and we took manure samples from all different types of systems, send them into several different labs and we compare them to what the average said that that nutrient should be and they were all different. So I can't stress enough that when you're looking at and your composition, it's still best to take a manure sample and send it in so that you know what you have. The biggest issue we have with nutrients is nutrient runoff. One of the big issues Michigan has is our algal blooms. We're surrounded by the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes are wonderful. They make us who we are. They give us character that give us pleasure. They're what we really want to see and our issue right now is we have nutrients loading in our surface water, specifically Lake Erie. That's the one that we talked about a lot, but we're seeing some big it issues up in the Saginaw Bay, and even up in parts of Lake Michigan, there's some areas on our watersheds that have excess nutrients in them and we're seeing some algal blooms. And one of the easiest ways to have an algal bloom is have an over application of nutrients. And the over application if we put too much manure out on the surface, and not enough of it goes down through the soil profile where the plants can uptake them and use them or microbial, microbes break it down. We actually see where it's getting into our surface water and causing these algal blooms and this causes oxygen depletion in our lakes and oxygen depletion will, will give us fish kills. So when that happens, we actually see reduction in canoeing or fishing, or even it can impact drinking water. So one of the thing we want to make sure that we keep nutrients out of the Great Lakes and we keep them out of all of our waterways. So how do you prevent run-off? The best way of doing it is having a proper storage. A proper storage should keep the manure from washing away and it's going to keep it from going into the ground. One of the issues that I've seen over the years is that in a place where we have a manure stockpiled, not properly managed, there's a lot of accumulation of nutrients underneath that stockpile and as it rains or we have snowmelt that that water, grabs those nutrients and pulls it down through that, down through our system and into our groundwater. And normally we talk about nitrogen as a groundwater contaminant. But with the new research and dissolved reactive phosphorus, we're seeing some increase in other areas such as phosphorus. That's the surface water contaminant. But we have to watch that groundwater too so we have to really make sure that we have a proper facility to store our manure and covered is the best thing to do. So there are some common types. There's a three-sided concrete. This is a holding area with a concrete floor that can easily be cleaned out and scraped. Um, you can cover or dry stack on clay or concrete once again. But remember, clay, even though we talk about clay being impervious, it actually isn't. Over time, water will slowly move through that clay so nutrients can leak. All of these should have some sort of roofed area. This can be very, very simple like this little simple hoop house you see in front of you. Anything simple, the roof that will keep water, clean water from getting into contact with that manure and diverted off. You can use a large tank or of course you can use the old standby, an earthen or concrete pit. So the biggest thing that you need to think about when you're placing your storage and we're thinking about nutrients is, is that you want, that manure storage away from surface water. You don't want it so that when it rains it's going to easily run into the surface water. So watch a slope. Make sure that if you have a surface water close by whether a drainage ditch and it may be one that only has water and a couple of weeks a year, but understand, it's got water in it and that water is going somewhere. It's usually going to surface water somewhere. So you want to make sure that you keep that manure safe from any water that could come in contact with it. So again, having a good solid floor is good. Having a roof is even better. The worst thing you can do is having OpenStack manure storage, where water can intercept it and nutrients can run off. Another thing you may want to consider is composting your manure. Compost is an extremely good way of reducing the amount of manure you actually have to deal with. If you, if you compost your manure. And I'm going to talk about compost a couple of minutes, but if you compost it correctly, it's going to be reduced by a half. So what you might have, let's say, let's do something really easy. So if we have two tons of manure, fresh manure, if we go and we compost that, we're going to have one ton. So that's one ton of manure you're going to be dealing with. It also is good because it can help kill those weed seeds that we see. It's going to help stabilize nutrients and it's going to kill diseases. Now one of the things I do want you to consider is if you go and spread this compost like you would if it was manure, understand that even though it stabilizes nutrients, it has a great reduction in the amount of nutrients. In fact, once you, once you have true compost it's really, really low fertility in that compost. So you may have to apply more than what you would if you use manure. So if you do compost, there's a couple runoff preventions you need to remember. Composting takes time. So we want to make sure that you give it adequate time and that you don't have runoff. And think of, I tell growers a lot, think of compost like you would if you had like a silage, you know, that there's issues with that, that if you have water that moves in through your compost and runs off, it could have some issues with with fish kills later on down the road. Good compost is not stockpiled manure. Compost is a, has a carbon and nitrogen ratio that is in balance. You actually have to turn those piles quite regularly to introduce oxygen into the manure. And that's going to allow it to heat up and it's going to allow it to break down. Good compost is constantly degrading, its breaking down. You should actually smell it. I mean, you're going to smell it, it's breaking down, it's rotting essentially. And the higher those temperatures of the internal, the internal compost pile temperatures, the faster it's going to break down. Compost is hot. Inside those piles, there should be steam coming off in this cold weather we're having right now, you still should see steam coming off a true compost. In compost you can, um, when we talk about spreading out om fields, you have to, or you should really go in and get a analysis of that compost. So once you have your manure or your compost, then you need to go out and spread it. And I'll tell you fresh manure, when you're spreading fresh manure, it is actually a great fertilizer. It's going to, it's going to give you that N-P and K. It'll be in the system for a couple of years. Once you put it in there, once fresh manure is introduced into a field system, soil microbes are going to break it down. They're going to break some of the down rather rapidly and they're going to release those nutrients. But it also will take some of those nutrients, about a third of them and it's going to slowly break it down over the next couple of years. So there's going to be a benefit of fertilizer source. It also is got tremendous amount of microbial population in that manure and it's going to enhance a soil is going to give us more of those microbes that we want in our soil. When you spread it, you really do need to look at the slope of your field. If it's a really, really steep slope, you need to make sure that you only spread on days where there's not water or there's not rain forecast so that we don't have runoff. If you have tile in your fields, stay away from those drainage system because those nutrients will go through this, through the soil and they can infiltrate down and get into the drainage system which can either go straight to a river or lake or it can be, can go back into someone else's field. Look at your weather forecast again. Make sure that your fields are not saturated. And you want to make sure that, that the day you spread. It's not going to rain the next day, if you are not going to incorporate it. Test your soil to make sure you're not over applying, specifically phosphorus. And then test your manure and also to make sure you know that nitrogen and phosphorous amounts. And then also you really want to look at your nutrients uptake by your crops. This is something that we are looking at. There looks like there's going to be some changes and recommendations for both crop removal and what our crops need. So, so really look into that, make sure that you have the correct crop removal rates for your fields. Other recommendations, really, we can't stress this enough when you spread manure, you need to keep records. You have to keep those records so you know how much you spread. When did I spread and where did I spray it, spread it. And that's because we don't want you to have a neighbor gets upset and makes a complaint. And then it comes back that you couldn't give them the information to say, Yes, I did this or no I couldn't. So you need to take good accurate records. And then the last thing I want to talk a little bit about when you're spreading manure is think of, think of your neighbors. Be good neighbors. Do not spread your manure If there's going to be a special event or it's a holiday and you know, your neighbor is going to have a party. Don't do it. They're going to be angry. They probably have a right to be angry. So use common sense, you'd be courteous. Another thing is keep your farm clean. I always joke around with the growers. I'm up in dairy land, up here and one of the things that I always tell farmers is people smell with their eyes. If you have a clean farm. they don't smell it. And it's funny, but I have recommended that, that they actually plant crimson clover, which is a beautiful plant. The plant I recommend that they plant flowers or wildflowers around their manure pits. People like them, they're pretty and they actually will have less complaints. So be courteous, keep it clean and that some of the best things you can do. All right. Did I do ten minutes? I had 10 minutes. Perfect. Any questions? Let's see. Right, Christina. Thank you so much. Are there any quick questions for Christina while she's still with us here tonight? Alright, Christina, once again, thank you very much for joining us, we really appreciate it. Going to go ahead and move on to talk about the highlighted topic for tonight and that is about pork production. So joining me here tonight is Dr. Dave Thompson, also Casey Zangarow. We make up half of the MSU pork team. We all work for MSU Extension and are based in county offices. Dave and I are going to be presenting to you tonight. We would love it if you have questions to put them in the Q and A, or put them in the chat box and we will absolutely address those as soon as we can. I am going to leave my video off because it does sound like we have some connection issues and just want to make sure that you guys can hear me as best you can. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen if I can find the right PowerPoints. And Dave, if you could let me know if you can see this correctly, I would appreciate that. I can see it. You don't have it on both screens, you've got it so that the there you go, you're on both screens, Beth. All right. Great. So we're going to go ahead and talk a little bit about some basic health practices for pigs and those of you that are interested in raising pigs. This presentation tonight is really geared towards some of our smaller farms. Some of you that might be doing some outdoor production. However, if you do, are interested, in some of our contract growing opportunities or maybe a larger operation, we're happy to answer those questions too. Three things that I'm going to talk about really quickly here, and we're just going to kind of touch the top of those mountains. We're going to talk a little bit about biosecurity, which are the steps in keeping our herds healthy. Identifying sick or at risk animals. And the reason that we really want to have some early interventions. And we're just going to really touch the tip of the iceberg on foreign animal diseases and why we as pork producers need to be aware and be prepared. So as we look at biosecurity in the simplest terms, biosecurity is how do we keep our pigs from getting sick? And how do we keep our pigs from spreading disease to other farms? In essence, biosecurity is a set of measures or production practices that you take to help protect the health of your herd. And there's also internal biosecurity measures that you can take so that sickness or disease does not spread within your farm. Some of the things that we want to do is, we want to make sure that we're keeping out those different pathogens are viruses that our heard has not been exposed to or has not been vaccinated against. We want to minimize the impact of an endemic pathogens. PEDB few years ago is a great example of that. None of our herds here in the US had seen PEDB, and when our herds did see it, it was pretty traumatic and we lost a lot of pigs. And then we also want to make sure that our biosecurity plan implements a program where we can manage our risk the best we can. We want to manage that risk so that we don't have detrimental effects on the farm and, and to our pigs, and to our herd. And these biosecurity plans. They take a lot of management and there's a lot of different things that go into those. They include: What goes into our buildings and our facilities? How do we manage those? How do we manage the people that are coming on and off our sites or coming to our farms? What about those machines and equipment that we may use on our farm and we may use at other farm sites? How do we control those so that we're cleaning and disinfecting those and not introducing disease or illness to our animals or our herds? The same thing with transportation and movement, that moving our pigs from site to site or moving them from a home facility to a contract facility or even to market. A lot of times, that's a risk that we take with biosecurity. The same as bringing supplies on and off our farm. And then finally, one of our biggest risks is our animals and how are we introducing new genetics to our herd without introducing new diseases that our herd hasn't seen. One of the things that we can do, a very basic part of our biosecurity plan is being able to restrict access to our buildings and our facilities. And there's two ways that we do that. One is by establishing a PBA or a perimeter buffer area. And this is the area around your farm where you're limiting the people that come into it. So the perimeter buffer, may be a fence line. It may be your property line, but you're not just going to have every Joe Schmoe drive up onto your farm who maybe was on a different farm just a few minutes ago or a few hours ago that could introduce a new disease or pathogen to your animals or to your heard. That's the perimeter buffer area. We don't really have to establish that. It's just we know where it is. We don't have to fence off our facilities it's just something that we know where the PBA is. And then we have a line of separation. Our line of separation, that last line of defense. That's the line between the pigs and not. That's the line where we have contact with those animals and where we really could introduce disease to our herds. There are times when we have herds that are kept outside on pasture that are PBA and our line of separation is actually the same. There are other times, like the picture above, where our PBA may be the property line, but our line of separation is actually the walls of that building. In pasture situations, the PBA and the line of separation, may be those fence lines and it may be the exact same thing, but we establish those so we kind of know boundaries or borders for our facilities. And as we think about that, we want to think about crossing the line of separation. When we're caring for animals and caring for our pigs, we want to have a line of separation in mind. It may be the driveway because you have a pasture-based system. It may be the door to your building. This is a common setup for some of our animals that are enclosed in buildings. Where you would enter into a building, you have a dirty side where you would leave those boots that you're going to wear around all over the place, to the store, to the gas station, maybe to an auction site. You're going to come in, you're going to leave those dirty boots there. You're going to cross that line of separation. Some of our facilities have a bench that you actually have to swing over and you're going to put on a pair of clean boots that stay in the barn. They're dedicated to that barn. And that is your line of separation. So you have a dirty side and a clean side. When you're talking about a pasture-based facility, you may have boots that are dedicated just to the farm, but you're not going all over the place. So at minimum, when we're talking about crossing the line of separation, we want to have dedicated boots that we're going to wear on our farm and on our farm only. That is one of the easiest way to spread disease is wearing those boots all over the place and then bring them right back into your pigs, or into your herd. So dedicated boots, if we can, dedicated clothes. A lot of our smaller farms, they may not have that shower facility where they can actually change clothes, but they have coveralls that they put on when they go to work out, work with their pigs, and then they take them off when they get back in their truck or when they go home. Maybe their house is right there where the farmers is and they leave them out on the back porch or leave them in the garage. And they are always using those same coveralls when they're going out to work with those animals. When we think about biosecurity, we have to remember that a lot of things can be a vector for disease spread. People, supplies, machines, equipment. If all of those are not cared for properly and if they're shared amongst people or amongst facilities, those can all transfer disease. And when we get into having to work through a disease traceback, to figure out how our animals got sick. Having records of what moved on and off your farm, that's animals, people, supplies and machine. That's key to being able to do one of those disease tracebacks and figure out why did, why did your pigs really get sick? When we talk about managing those different things, we talk about people and we talk about downtime and that's time away from other pigs. It's suggested that if you go to see a different herd or go to an auction facility or even go to the county fair that maybe you stay at least two days away from your own herd if possible. And that gives us downtime so that if we are carrying anything on our body, palms of our hands, we've showered, we've cleaned our hands, we've changed our clothes or at least washed them. We've changed our boots and we're not going to carry anything to our pigs. If you can't get those two days of downtime because you have no one else to care for your herd, changing clothes, maybe even take the time to take a shower. But changing clothes, washing your hands and changing your boots, those are key things we can do to help keep disease and sickness away from our herd. Things that we want to know when it comes with supplies, machines and equipment. Where did it come from and does it need to be cleaned and disinfected? There's a lot of times when we do business and we work with different companies. We had a case when PED was out where we had a farm that was completely clean from PEDV, nothing came in, nothing went out. We could not figure out why they broke again. Turns out it had an auger that had gone bad and needed to be fixed. They took it to a machine shop. At that machine shop, they were fixing augers from PED positive herds and they got contaminated that way when they brought the auger back, it spread that disease, contaminated that barn because of the dust that it got from those other augers sitting at the machine shop. So we have to be very conscientious of what we're bringing into our farm. And, if we can, clean and disinfect it. Instead of bringing that auger in from that facility - straight from that facility, we could have taken the time to clean it off. We could have disinfected it with even a simple solution of bleach and water and that would have prevented some of that dust and that virus from getting into our home herd. When it comes to managing our animals in our genetic material, that is the biggest risk for the production of disease to your herd. So it's really important when you're bringing in new genetics, whether that's the animals, whether it's semen, to make sure that you're working with a reputable company and it's worth to ask, Do you have current diagnostic records? Is there anything going on? Are you seeing anything spike in your herd? If possible, when you're bringing in new animals, you want to isolate them from your herd for 21 to 30 days. If you have different pastures, you can put them in, different rooms in a barn. That's great. If you don't have that, if we can eliminate at least nose to nose contact, that is super helpful. Look at this picture. This isn't doing that right? So these are new pigs. There's pigs and one pen, there's pigs in the pen next to it. And they just put new pigs in this facility. And what do they all do? They immediately run to the fence line they are nose to nose. So anything those pigs had that we got from a different farm, the are going to give to those other pigs in the barn. Had we been on top of things and just put a piece of plywood between those two pens, it would have eliminated the nose to nose contact and at least reduced our risk a little bit with not much work. We want to make sure when we do bring new animals into the farm, if we are able to isolate them, you work with them last, so you care for most animals on your herd and then you go ahead and you work with those new animals. The other thing you want to do is if you don't have to, you don't share that equipment back and forth. Because remember, even equipment can be that vector for disease. And we want to make sure as we're waiting those two to three weeks to four weeks, that we're observing our animals for any signs of disease or illness, making sure we're watching them, see if they're bringing anything into the farm that we maybe haven't seen on our place before. Those are just some really quick biosecurity tips. If people have more questions about those, love to answer them after that and we can really go into, I can give you a whole hour's worth a\of presentation on just biosecurity alone. But right now we're going to move into the early identification of at-risk animals. And when we're talking about healthy pigs and making sure pigs are getting off to a good start. It's really important that we, as the caretakers of these animals, learn how to identify those animals early if they are sick, if they are ill. This is key to being able to address those health issues. It's better for us economically, it's better for those pigs. It's better for the growth rate and it easier on everybody. Being able to identify pigs that are at risk or ill are starting to get sick can be done pretty simply. One of the easiest ways to think about this is using the B.E.S.T system and that is an acronym that stands for body, eyes, ears, nose, skin and hair and temperament. And what the B.E.S.T. system does is it gives you an easy way to be able to observe a pig for all of those things. As we talk about the B.E.S.T. system, what you're going to do is you're looking at these pigs as you want to make sure that you see them each as an individual. When you only have five or six pigs on your farm, it's easier to see them as an individual. But when you're walking in a large pig pen with maybe 30 pigs out on pasture or a 100 pigs in a pen, and a contract facility, it's a little harder to see them all as individuals. So when you utilize the B.E.S.T. system, it's starting at the nose of that pig, making sure that your eyes are going over the top of that pig, past the ears, around behind that pig, underneath the belly of that pig and back again to the nose. So it's the smooth circle that you're making when you're observing those pigs. What does that do? It's a systematic approach to make sure you're looking at every single pig, observing them for any issues that might happen. It's also an easy way to train new employees or if you have family members that are helping on the farm. Hopefully each and every one of you, even if you have animals, have a chance to go away on vacation sometime during the year and you may need somebody to help you. It could be your nephew who's 17, but it's easy to teach them how to observe pigs using this B.E.S.T. system. The other thing that we want to make sure we're doing is completing daily observation. That's key to identifying when a pig is at risk. A lot of our farms use automatic waterers and automatic feeders. But making sure that we're in the pens with those pigs walking around, getting them up, doing a daily observations. Is key to seeing when something is going wrong and being able to help that pig and fix what's wrong before it gets worse. When we talk about the B.E.S.T. system, we talked about the B in B.E.S.T., standing for body. When you think about the body of the pig, you want to make sure when you're observing it, when you're doing that systematic approach, that you're looking at the soundness of the pig, you're looking at the condition. So if that pig like this picture is showing is starting to get rail thin, you're starting to see maybe some of the backbone on that pig, those hip bones, you know that something is going on because the body condition isn't good. Also going to look at the hair coat of that animal. All pigs, we want this nice smooth hair coat. Even those pigs that are outside, it's still should be shiny, it still should be smooth. It's probably a little thicker than you would see if they were kept inside. but you still want that nice smooth hair coat. Anytime a pig's hair coat starts to get dull and rough and really, really shaggy, a lot of times we know there's something else going on. You're going to look for those skin issues on the pigs. You are going to want to view for any injuries that they may have. You'll look for things like hernias that may happen to those pigs. Again, something that we can address if we find it early enough. And you're also going to want to look for any unusual swelling or inflammation on those pigs. The other thing when you're observing them is you're going to want to make sure that they have a normal respiration. They're not breathing too hard. They're not breathing too slow or too shallow. When we think about the B.E.S.T. system. E stands for ears, eyes, and nose, and we'll talk about that next. First we're going to skip over to our skin observations. We already talked a little bit about that. Again, I want to reiterate that smooth, clean, flat, hair coat, lack of injuries. We want to look to see if we have any swelling or irritation, anything that could be an abscess on those picks. Sometimes we call it football air when that gets smashed or crimped or bit by another pig and it may swell up, looks like a football, but it's a hematoma and it's full with blood and we can do some stuff to fix that for those pigs. When we look at the eyes, ears, and nose on the pigs, we want to look for any unusual discharge. Anything that's crusty red or irritated amongst the eyes that we could have pink eye, we could have a fever going on because our eyes are bloodshot. Those are key signs. We could have some ventilation or some air quality issues if their eyes are matted, having that discharge running down from them. You're going to look for any obvious swelling or inflammation specifically in the ears. anything that may be discoloration that's happening. You'll also want to make sure that there's no unusual discharge through the nose or if that nose starts to turn and go crooked, it's also a sign that something may start to happen. And then you want to look at the pig and see just how they're acting. So we move into the temperament of the pig, right? Pigs are very social animals. They're bright, they're inquisitive. They look at you. They want to know where you're at, especially when you're in the pen. When we have that pig that's exhibiting those dull, depressed type of actions, doesn't look at you, is away from the group. That head is down. They're isolated. Maybe they're not eating. Sometimes they're doing head shaking or, or bouncing, those repetitive behaviors. All of those are temperament issues that should clue us in that something is going wrong when a pig doesn't feel well, typically it's going to self isolate. It's going to move away from the group and you can tell by what it looks like. So observation is absolutely key. Remember, early identification of issues equals early treatment. And treatment doesn't have to be medication. Treatment can simply be removal from a group. Treatment can be further observation. But knowing that there's an issue with that pig, knowing that that's happening early allows us the best opportunity for a positive outcome. So here's a great example. These are some piglets that more than likely have a strep infection. So streptococcus is something that we see a lot in our herds. So early onset of that for our pigs is when the pigs are shivering. They lay on their belly, they're all hunched up, their hair starts to get rough. Maybe their joints, especially their their leg joints get really inflamed. And a lot of times are going to have this constant movement of the eyes. Those are all signs of strep infection. If we can get to those pigs and we can treat them early when we first see that a lot of times that pig is going to turn around and it will be just fine. If we don't get to that pig. And we don't make that observation even within the next day, that pig could get to the point where it is too late. And you will see it exhibit signs like this. This is where a pig maybe on its side, it's going to have convulsions. A lot of times you'll see them paddle and just move around in a complete circle. They won't be able to stand and I don't care how much medication you give that pig. It's really hard to have a pig come back from something like that. And really difficult to get them to a point where they're going to grow like we want them to. So remember that early identification is key when we're talking about disease or illness on our farms. Moving along really quickly, I just want to touch on foreign animal disease or FAD. Those are something that we all need to be prepared for. We all need to kind of think about because no matter the size of your herd, the size of your farm, if we have a foreign animal disease outbreak, it is going to affect you. So we want to make sure that our producers, people that have pigs are aware and prepared. Please understand that if we do have a foreign animal disease, how that's managed across the states going to happen from our regulatory officials. So the Michigan Department of Ag and Rural Development is really going to come in. They're going to manage those outbreaks. And you as a farmer, may not have a choice as to what happens to those animals on your farm. What they could do is they could stop the movement of any animals dependent on the disease if it's something that could be spread between different species. They could stop the movement of any animals and they have to be quarantined on your farm. That means any animals coming or going. If they're ready for market, they have to stay at your farm and on your facility if there's a disease outbreak. At times, they may make it so the only time you can move pigs can be done by a permit. And there's a whole process that we're working on fleshing out with the Department of Agriculture on what those permits are going to look like and what producers are going to have to do to get one of those permits. Again, MDARD could ask a farm site to quarantine and if it's found that you actually do have an infection with a foreign animal disease, they may ask you to depopulate or get rid of your herd. If your a herd is clean, but there is a herd even five miles away that is positive. They could still ask you to depopulate that herd just because there might be a risk that your pigs could be infected. Remember, that's not dependent on farm size. It doesn't matter how big or small your farm is, or the type of production or the number of animals. If we have a foreign animal disease and you have a herd of a 100 pigs and your next door neighbor has 2 fair pigs, if you're herd, is sick, more than likely, those 2 fair pigs next door will also have to depopulate just because of proximity. It doesn't matter that they're fair pigs and it doesn't matter that there's just 2 of them. It's because of what's happening. So during a foreign animal disease outbreak, it's your responsibility to try to keep your animals from being infected. And that is really going to take a lot of biosecurity practices that you can implement. So we gotta make sure that we're on top of that and aware and we control what we can for our herd. Why is this a concern? Well, we have three big foreign animal diseases that should be on everybody's radar. We've got classical swine fever that we have not seen in the US since 1978. We also have foot mouth and here in the United States we haven't seen that since 1929. We have seen some foot mouth move across European nations though. The one thing that we all need to be aware of and the reason we kind of slip that into this talk is because of African swine fever. African swine fever is a very contagious and deadly viral disease that affects all types of hogs, both domestic, both wild hogs or feral pigs. It does not a threat to human health. You can not good it from eating pork that has African swine fever. But why we are concerned here in the United States is because recently, African swine fever has spread through all parts of China. We have seen it in Mongolia, we've seen in Vietnam. We have seen it in a number of European Union's. It is moving around. And the fear is that it will come to the United States. Although we have not seen it yet, we need to be aware and we need to be prepared. Things that African swine looks like is, here are some of the pictures. And unfortunately it can mimic a lot of diseases that we see on our herds. But you can see the lesions. You can see those nose lesions on those pigs. You're going to see some of the bands around the ankles with lesions. And you're going to see sudden death on your farm. If you start to see anything that looks like this on your farm, you want to make sure that you contact a vet or you contact MDARD right away just so that they know about this. Because unfortunately with African swine fever, it can be spread through pigs and genetics. It can be spread through supplies and people, but it can also come through in the feed. And a lot of our feed products, and that's our vitamins, our minerals, come from China. So although our feed companies are taking extra care and extra biosecurity and holding things. It's still something that we really need to be aware of as we think about different foreign animal diseases that could actually impact us here in the United States. Those are just some really quick overviews on foreign animal disease, biosecurity and identifying at-risk pigs. Because some of the questions that we get a lot have to do with how should I deworm my pigs and how should I vaccinate my pigs? We're going to go ahead and let Dr. Dave Thompson take over and give you some quick tips on deworming and vaccination protocols. Dave, why don't you take it away? Okay, Beth. Thank you very much and hello everyone. We're going to extend Beth's theme on biosecurity and prevention. We're going to move to non- foreign animal diseases now. We'll discuss parasites sites that infect pigs first and then move on to important viral and bacterial infections. Some of the parasites we'll describe infect pigs and people and are referred to as zoonotic and we show a few of them here. Ascarus, for instance, the, the pig in the unusual situation in the upper right, can move from grass or dirt into a person's mouth and then two to three months later cause the same symptoms in the person that this pig is dealing with. And then tapeworms from pigs are still a huge problem in many parts of the world. including Mexico. And you can see the brain damage caused in the lower right panel, which is really dramatic, lethal if left untreated. Trichinella which builds up in the muscle. We don't really have a lot of it here in the US anymore because we cooked pork to a 145 degrees before eating it and that kills the larvae. And then toxoplasma is just a example of a city, a type of single-cell organisms. So you can see the range of sizes and that's part of the challenge of treating parasites. Next slide Beth. Yeah, there are really several major challenges in preventing and treating parasite infections in pigs. Many of the species thrive and damp grass and mud, especially where there are rodents, birds, beetles and earthworms, in all of which can keep the parasite life cycle going and help spread them around. Another huge problem is that the eggs of some species including ascaris, can live in the mud in a dormant state for up to ten years and then suddenly hatch and infect pigs or people. Unfortunately, unlike viruses and bacteria, parasites can't be controlled using vaccines. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that at all stages, their surface is coated with a very tough material, often made of collagen. And this prevents antibodies and immune cells from attaching and destroying parasites in the same way they do viruses and bacteria. Many of these parasites also develop drug resistance over time, and this makes them less sensitive to the drugs that are available. Next slide, Beth. Next slide. So, yeah, there are a number of really powerful medications that can be used to treat parasites. But to select the best one, most cost effective treatment option, it's useful to know which parasites have infected your pigs. And sometimes simple clinical observations can be used to accomplish that. In the case of roundworm infections, pigs will frequently cough a lot or go off feed. That can be an early sign. The easiest path to a clear cut diagnosis would come when you can see the parasites, usually roundworms and tapeworms in the pigs stool. And we've shown a picture over here on the upper right of that, but with a small microscope or even a good magnifying glass you can find eggs in the stool as well. Oral fluids testing will probably become the most convenient option within the next few years for doing good diagnoses. Iowa State University is already running an oral fluids essay for ascaris and they're working on many others. Next slide, Casey, The key to preventing parasite infections is to disrupt their lifecycle. For the fair pig folks online, you should begin with healthy animals that had been dewormed before pick up, isolate the new animals for four weeks when you bring them to your farm. Keep the pens clean and dry as possible. Removing manure that builds up every two to three days. Wash your equipment, provide good nutrition, but don't feed table scraps that contain any meat products. With parasites raised on pasture or even inside but without slotted floors. It's also helpful if you can rotate the pens periodically. This provides some time for the eggs and larvae to die off before they can infect other pigs. You want to keep rodents and raccoons away and it's important to dispose of all animal carcasses quickly and properly, as they may be carrying parasites that will outlive the animal that dies. Finally, you want to use dewormers as recommended by your vet. We'll provide some general recommendations for those in a minute. And be sure and isolate and treat your infected animals. You don't want to leave infected animals untreated. Next slide. In terms of treatment selection, we recommend rotating two different products to help control possible development of resistance. These four wormers shown on the left side can give, can be given in feed or water and they're very commonly used in Michigan among these in- feed options, Safe-Guard has the broadest spectrum, but typically costs more than Levasole, Wazine or or Banminth. Many farmers that asked us to recommend an in-feed parasiticide for boars, Safe-Guard is an excellent option. We also like the Ivermectin, especially for their broad spectrum and duration of efficacy. There are injectable and in-feed formulations available, the in-feed as a type a premix. Another advantage of using amectin is that it's spectrum includes lice and mites. There are also numerous topical treatments for ectoparasites. These are usually cheaper and they work well but for a very short period of time. And keep in mind that many of these products come with withdrawal times that you have to be aware of too. Next slide, then I think Casey. Let's consider a few different types of pigs and what we at MSU recommend for routine parasite control. But keep in mind as we go through these that every farm will have a different set of issues with their parasites. So it's a good idea to work with your vet on a program that's right for you and your farm. Pastured pigs, should have as much manure removed every three days as possible and treat the gilt or sow with Ivomec Safe-Guard one to two weeks before farrowing. And the piglets with the same drugs that 3 and 6 months of age. And it's a good idea to rotate the drugs. For show pigs, clean your pens regularly and use Ivomec or Safe-Guard on arrival. And again, two to four weeks before fair. Be aware, again, that you meet any of the withdrawal requirements, especially if Amectin is used. Okay, next slide, I think Casey. So in summary, then parasites are rarely fatal, but they do cause a significant production losses you want to control. And pastured pigs are more likely to become heavily infected and parasitized in pigs raised on slats. The objective is to keep burdens low as possible. There are parasites everywhere and your pigs are always picking them up. You can't keep the numbers to 0, but you really want to try to keep the burden is low and in good good biosecurity and preventive measures, along with judicious use of implementing can accomplish that. Good husbandry, right diet. Certainly no meat, keep your pens clean, free of wildlife which can pass the parasites along. Most parasites that can be treated with Ivomec/Dectomax or Safe-Guard. There's oral formulations of these available and consult your vet to develop the right control program on your farm. So I think in the interest of time, Beth and Casey will. Oh, okay. No, these are some of the common, slides that I didn't realize this, this actually made it. In terms of the pre-weaners, greasy pig. and then the enterics, okay, we have moved to diseases. Yeah, so we're going to move from parasites to it, a little bit of a delay. And that, that in terms of the parasites, what we're gonna do now is move to common bacterial and viral diseases. And when thinking of these, it's important to know that diseases that affect really changes the animals mature. This is why vaccine strategy is important and why it's useful to develop a game plan with your vet. Pre-weaners, see a lot of enteric diseases as their gut microbiota, it's very slow to develop. So you're going to see a lot of TGE, PEDB, Clostridia and E. coli. And these can be important pathogens in your pig when they're pre-weaners in particular. Post-weaners start to see more respiratory diseases including PRRS, influenza and M.hyo. The type of GI bugs they see shift a bit towards at Brachyspira, Salmonella, and Lawsonia. They also begin to see Erysipelas and Glasser's. Breeding stock are likely to see many of these, especially influenza, but also parvo, lepto and mastitis. Next slide Beth or Casey. When thinking about what diseases you should vaccinate your herd against, I think it's reasonable to begin by looking at what other small producers target in their programs. And that varies again by stage of animal, as you might expect. In 2012, the last time the USDA did a really comprehensive study looking at this, 75% of breeding females on small farms routinely vaccinated for PLE and over 60% for influenza am M.hyo and PCV too. Again on weaner to finish your operations, 85% were vaccinated with PCV2 and M.hyo and 33% for erysipelas and E. coli. For grower and finisher farms, 50% were vaccinated with PCV2 and M.hyo. I think these national trends also reflect what we see in Michigan. These numbers will be updated this summer when USDA conducts their next small producer swine 2021 survey. And we'll come back to that in a few minutes. I suspect the next time around PEDB and PRRS might appear on this list now that there are reasonably useful vaccines for them. Next slide then Beth. This table describes the vaccination schedule recommended by MSU Extension pork team. But this should be viewed as really a base plan. Your plan should depend on what's going on on your farm and your neighbor's farm. And it's a good idea to work with your vet on that. The schedule is designed to prevent the most important diseases that occur in Michigan pigs for which there are solid vaccines available. You can see that recommendation calls for all IM dosing. And timing is so that to provide highest antibody titers around key phases and that takes life, sometimes to ensure the piglets will receive antibiotics from the sow. Boars at MSU are vaccinated every six months for flu, Circo and M.hyo. And they may also receive PCV2 to an M.hyo at weaning. Exhibition pigs are given influenza and Circo six weeks and again three weeks before fair. We also recommend erysipelas about six weeks before a show. We'll post this table on the MSU Extension web page later this week in case you want to go back and review it. Next slide then Beth. So giving your vaccination properly is, is as important as the vaccine itself. Here are a few time tested tips for that, starting with proper cleaning of the injection site for which IM dosing should be behind the ear. Using the right length and gauge of needle is important because you want to reach the muscle tissue but not below it. And you want to cause minimal damage around the injection site. When needles do become dull. So you should change them out about every 10 injections. Other things, store vaccines as per instructions. Check the vial for expiration date. It's really important to keep good records of what you vaccinate with and when, and to do an annual review with your vet. In summary, then next slide, Beth. Yeah, In summary, then vaccines are usually a cost effective way to prevent or reduce the impacts of a disease. A $5 or $10 investment should give you on average a $20 to $40 return in today's dollars. But once again, that vaccine should not be viewed as a substitute for good husbandry, including biosecurity practices that Beth talked about earlier buy pigs from a reputable farm, ideally a single source and one that will share vaccine and de-worming records with you. Isolate new animals on the farm for four weeks before commingling with existing pigs. Always work with your vet to prevent diseases that are common in your area, and especially those that have occurred recently on your farm. It's a good idea to conduct some type of diagnostics or surveillance if you're seeing something that doesn't just seem right to you. Oral fluids testing as a low cost option for that and one that you can work with your vet on. and I should mention, while there are a few parasites that there are oral fluids testing for, there are many, many of the important bacterial and viral diseases that there are oral fluid essays for. So they can do those at Michigan State or they can do them at Iowa State or South Dakota. With that Beth, I think I'll turn things back over to you. I think you wanted to say something about VCPR. Yeah, Thanks Dave, very much. You have one more slide here. Did you want to talk about the study? Yeah. Just a reminder that the USDA would be conducting a small enterprise study probably beginning this August so it seems like things keep getting pushed back a little bit due to COVID. But if they do contact you, I would encourage you to participate in the study. It's the only way they're going to get really current and accurate information is for people to participate in those studies. And I think you'd learn a lot just from doing it. If you do participate that you'll be on a list to receive a ton of useful information as time goes on. So by all means, if they give the a chance to participate, take that chance in, and enjoy it. Thank you, Beth. Thanks, Dave. Really good information. One of the thing. So we also want to make sure that we're thinking about, no matter how big your herd is, whether it's just three or four pigs you're raising for your freezer and your neighbors. Or if you're selling 30-40 head on the open market, or even more than that, it's really important to have that VCPR, the veterinarian client, patient relationship. And people are always worried about the cost of veterinary medicine. And yep, having a vet come out to your farm can get a little expensive, but establishing that relationship with the veterinarian costs nothing. And a lot of times it's just one phone call or some vets will even work where when you have that relationship with them, they know how your facility runs, what your production is. You can text them a picture or you can face-time them. And you don't have that farm visit cost and they'll be able to give you a really good solid information and direction when you're having challenges for your herd. So making sure we have that VCPR established is really critical. We have some vets in Michigan or those that service Michigan that work only with pig farmers, as well as some of those mixed practice vets that do a lot with a lot of different animals. If you've seemed to have a lack of large livestock vets in your area. Let Dave or I know or Casey know. We can point you in the direction of someone who can help. I'm so very critical that we all have that VCPR established. As we move on and kind of close out the night, we want to invite any questions that you may have. Here's the contact information for both Dave and myself. You can find any of our information on the MSU Extension website and we're happy to answer any questions that you guys may have. So if you'd like to put those in the question and question and answer box or in the chat. We're happy to address those. That would be great. What I am going to put in the chat right now is a link to a quick survey. This type of meeting is the first time we've really ever done on a large meeting conference that covers a whole week with various different topics that we're really looking to get some information for you guys on. What other things you want to hear about if you liked this virtual setting, this option, and what other information is applicable to you and your facility. So please just take a minute. It'll take you less than ten minutes to go ahead and answer that survey. You can do it really quickly by clicking on a link here, even on your phone if you'd like to. Again, we really want to thank you all for coming tonight. If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Let us know but really appreciate the time that you took to listen to this presentation. Hopefully you learned a little bit of something. Are able to take something back and apply it to your herd. So Dave, anything else you have to say to close out the meeting? No, I just want to reiterate, Beth, thank you to everyone who who zoomed in tonight. And we really appreciate your interest in this topic and I hope you have, I hope we have a good fair season this year. Unlike last year for the for the young people who are counting on that. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you Dave and Casey thank you for the help behind the scenes. Really appreciate everyone who was here tonight. And again, feel free to reach out to us via email or phone call if you do have some other burning questions or need help with anything, always happy to help and happy to visit with you about your production facility and always happy to talk about pigs. So thank you everybody for joining us here tonight. Really appreciate the time and everybody stay safe out there.