A well-designed biosecurity plan is essential for managing and reducing risks to your livestock. Start by breaking the plan into clear categories with specific on-farm actions. For example, establish protocols for outside visitors to minimize potential disease introduction.

Next, determine the level of risk you are comfortable accepting and managing. This will vary depending on your operation type and can be categorized as high, medium or low.

Accurate, up-to-date records of animal health, data and transportation movements are critical. These records give you the information needed to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

Finally, make sure your plan is practical and cost-effective. A plan that looks good on paper but cannot be implemented will not provide real benefits. For more information, refer to the biosecurity resources available on the Beef Cattle Research Council, Government of Canada and Verified Beef Production Plus websites.

Animal movement

Controlling animal movement is one of the most effective ways to prevent the introduction and spread of disease. Proper management reduces pathogen exposure, protects vulnerable animals and helps maintain overall herd health. Implementing the following strategies during calving season can significantly lower biosecurity risks:

• When doing chores, consider starting in the low-risk areas first and working your way up to the higher-risk areas to prevent any pathogens from spreading.
• Segregate high-risk or sick animals from the main herd to prevent disease transmission. Sick animals should have their own segregated area where commingling is reduced.
• Group cattle according to risk level. For example, the Sandhills calving system can reduce pathogen exposure in calving areas by separating freshly calved pairs and pregnant cows.
• Quarantine new animals for 21-30 days before introducing them to the herd to protect both the new animals and the existing herd. This reduces the risk of disease exposure and spread.
• Manage contaminants such as manure, soil piles and deadstock carefully. These areas should be positioned to avoid draining into water sources.

Cleaning, disinfecting and PPE

Maintaining a clean environment using the right tools and proper personal protective equipment (PPE) are essential to any biosecurity plan. Effective cleaning and disinfecting helps eliminate pathogens before they spread, while PPE protects both you and your livestock from disease risks. These practices should be consistent and thorough to ensure maximum protection:

• Cleaning and drying of a surface is required prior to disinfecting. Disinfecting uses chemicals to break down pathogens. When using disinfecting products, it is important to know which pathogens you are trying to eliminate, the mixing instructions and the recommended contact time for the pathogen to be destroyed. More information on this can be found on the Beef Cattle Research Council website.
• Clean and disinfect equipment, tools, trailers and transport vehicles regularly, especially after handling sick animals. Don’t forget items like bottles or stomach tubes, as cross-contamination can be a serious threat to newborn calves.
• Wearing proper PPE is imperative for protecting yourself from zoonotic pathogens and disease. Zoonotic diseases are infectious pathogens that are naturally spread from animals to humans. Salmonella is a common zoonotic disease that may be transmitted from sick calves during calving season. Some items to wear when appropriate for specific tasks include coveralls, boots and gloves.
• Practice proper hygiene by washing your hands. Hand washing is a critical step to prevent the spread of pathogens between animals and people.

Work with your veterinarian

Calving season is busy for veterinarians, too. Establishing a vet-client relationship ahead of time ensures the veterinarian knows your operation and can assist with animal health, medications and vaccinations when needed.

Calving season brings unique challenges, but implementing a practical biosecurity plan helps protect both your herd and your operation. By focusing on creating a biosecurity plan involving animal movement, sanitation and veterinary support strategies, you can reduce disease risks and set your operation up for a successful calving season.

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Biocontainment procedures were immediately put on the site where the virus was detected, while Manitoba Pork and the Chief Veterinary Office recommended all premises heighten biosecurity in a large swath of southeastern Manitoba.

That area is defined by a western boundary of Hwy. 75, north by PR 210, east by Hwy. 12, and south by Hwy. 52 (and mile road 36N that continues west from 52 to 200 and the Red River).

This area has been impacted by PED in May and June of the past three years.

These roadways were chosen to provide well-defined boundaries for all involved to be vigilant, said Jenelle Hamblin, Manitoba Pork Council (MPC) swine health manager.

“Those roadways provide a physical reminder for people in the area to enhance their biosecurity because the risk is still there,” she said.

Manitoba Pork issued an advisory just before the long weekend notifying all producers to consult their veterinarian on enhanced biosecurity protocols for implementing on their specific premises.

• Read more: Pork sector mixed victories and challenges in 2017
• Read more: Pork sector learns biosecurity lessons from PEDv

“The main message we’ve been giving is to work closely with the veterinarian to develop the protocols, because every site is set up differently and functions differently,” Hamblin said.

“The biggest thing is working with your veterinarian to develop those biosecurity protocols that work best for your operation.”

Procedures include controlled access zones and limiting the site traffic to essential service providers. Parking vehicles well away from the barn and implementing physical barriers in the barn to remind staff of shoe and glove changes are also recommended preventive actions.

PEDv is both “frustrating and scary” but producers do need to remember the risk remains and to analyze that risk in everything they’re doing, Hamblin said, adding that means very close attention to everything coming into the barn, who is entering the barn and the practices while working with the animals.

“This virus is tricky,” she said. “It moves on many different things and we have found that it has been able to breach through when premises are practising strong biosecurity.

“We do have to remain vigilant with every single thing we do. It’s something we have to keep in mind with every practice and everything that’s happening on the premises. Sometimes that can be hard to remember in things we normally do. It can just take one slip when we’re dealing with an outbreak in the barn.”

Related to 2017’s outbreak, there are 68 premises that have reached presumptive negative status, meaning the affected producer has implemented strict measures to eliminate PED from all pigs and pig contact areas and has confirmed the virus has been eliminated through repeated animal and environmental testing.

Eleven premises remain transitional and one positive site remains.

Manitoba’s hog producers have been dealing with incidents of PED since a first confirmed case in February of 2014. The sector was hit especially hard in 2017, when 80 barns tested positive.

The events of last year served to rivet producers’ attention on the need for tightened biosecurity and to pay very close attention to movements on and off farm.

“The main message would be to continue that heightened biosecurity if you haven’t already put it in place,” Hamblin said.

Upon confirmation of last week’s case, the barn was closed immediately and all biocontainment measures put into effect to prevent the spread of the disease.

PED causes severe dehydration and diarrhea in pigs, and usually kills young animals although older animals can recover. It is not transmitted to humans or other animals and is not a food safety risk.

All producers are being urged to sign on to the password-protected Manitoba Coordinated Disease Response (MCDR) online to access detailed information regarding statuses and locations of affected premises.

To arrange to sign a producer confidentiality/information sharing agreement to access MCDR, or for other assistance, contact Hamblin at jhamb lin@manitobapork.com or 204-235-4442.

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She was joining the organization as its swine health program manager in the midst of an outbreak of the porcine disease PEDv, a situation that’s roiled the pork sector throughout North America in recent years.

• Read more: Expanded staff to put hog disease in the crosshairs
• Read more: Manitoba Pork turns to producer-based program to stem PEDv outbreak

“The predominant efforts have been managing the current outbreak,” Hamblin told the Co-operator, “but in that response we are looking at the current biosecurity protocols that the industry has in place across the board.”

MPC announced the position in midsummer, at the height of the now slowing porcine epidemic diarrhea (PEDv) outbreak in southeastern Manitoba.

The disease is devastating to young animals, causing up to 80-100 per cent mortality in suckling piglets, is infamously hard to get rid of and has been among the industry’s disease boogeymen since it first appeared in North America in 2013.

This year has been the worst PEDv year on record in Manitoba, with 79 cases as of Oct. 12, almost eight times more than the previous three years combined.

The outbreak prompted the Man­itoba Pork Council to ramp up disease management programming, both to take a hard look at existing policy and jump-start communication between farmers, veterinarians, MPC and other provincial and national disease management bodies.

Important move

Andrew Dickson, MPC general manager, said PEDv may have been what prompted the new animal health position, but added that it’s going to be a key building block in the coming years.

“We’ve been able to enhance the services for all of our producers to try and help them, to get them through this disease outbreak and we’re starting to build some programs and services helping producers to deal with further diseases that may eventually start to appear,” he said.

The pork council has been keeping a running record of on-farm and industry practices to identify what has been working and any gaps to address.

The Manitoba Coordinated Disease Response also falls under Hamblin’s mandate. The initiative was unveiled earlier this year as a way to connect farmers and veterinarians with disease management efforts. The program’s website was launched soon after, posting general notices, and the disease status of infected farms and resources.

Farmers have bought into the program, Hamblin said. As of Oct. 17, 70 per cent of pork producers in southeast Manitoba had signed on and agreements are still coming.

“We’ve had very positive feedback on the program,” she said. “Producers are accessing the information. Veterinarians are accessing the information regularly. We can kind of go behind the scenes from our website and take a peek on, ‘Is this being used?’ We were very happy to see that guys are logging in regularly and taking a look at the information that we’re putting up there for them to utilize.”

MPC hopes to eventually expand the program into other regions and to fight future disease threats.

“Moving forward, the approach that we’re taking toward PED in terms of disease management — we want to expand into other diseases such as PRSS and implement the same open communication style, working with multiple industry partners, the CVO’s office (Manitoba Chief Veterinary Officer), MPC, the herd veterinarians, to really tackle these diseases as a whole and work together as an industry to manage these diseases in the province,” Dickson said.

PRRS (porcine respiratory reproductive syndrome) causes infertility and “mummified piglets” as well as lung issues in adults and is another major disease threat to Canadian hogs.

PEDv update

Manitoba saw the first unexplained PEDv infection in over a month Oct. 12.

Two finisher barns tested positive for the virus on Sept. 5 and Sept. 15, both linked to animal movement when pigs were transferred from an infected farm.

In the latest case, the cause is unknown.

“There’s a lot of work going on right now to try and figure out what happened. We don’t know. It caught us off guard,” Dickson said.

Efforts to slow the disease are having an effect, he said, evidenced by the slowdown in new cases since July. He warned against relaxing biosecurity, however, as the outbreak is still ongoing.

Of the 79 cases, 32 are considered transitional, with no critically sick animals and certain groups no longer shedding the virus. Another eight are assumed presumptive negative, with no infected pigs, although the virus may still be lurking in manure storage.

The risk profile may change with the incoming cold. Dickson says fall and winter would ordinarily come with higher risk, with the cold and wet making it easier for the pathogen to get into barns.

It is unknown if that pattern will hold.

The outbreak in Manitoba has not mimicked outbreaks in other areas, according to Dickson.

“We’re starting to find all kinds of things about this disease that were relatively unknown,” he said. “We’re finding, for example, that there’s a high survival rate in some pigs, higher than expected.”

There has been more investigative work this year than in some previous Canadian cases, Dickson said.

The post Swine health hire highlights disease management appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

A finisher and sow barn were confirmed PED positive in the space of two days. Manitoba Pork Council general manager Andrew Dickson said finisher barn staff noticed symptoms May 14.

“That doesn’t mean every pig in the barn has got it at this moment in time, it just means some of the pigs got it, but it’s likely to spread,” Dickson said.

The pork council is acting on the assumption that the whole barn is infected.

“The question that then rises is it’s a feeder barn, so did the baby pigs that went into that barn, did they bring it in?” Dickson said.

Another case was confirmed in a nearby sow barn May 18.

Manitoba chief veterinary officer, Dr. Megan Bergman, was not available for comment, but previously told industry broadcast Farmscape that an investigation was underway into the source of the infections.

• Read more: Regional-level biosecurity urged against PED in Manitoba

Two sow operations and another finishing barn were previously confirmed positive for the disease on May 2, May 4 and May 8. All five cases lie within kilometres of each other, the province has said.

The newest report brings Manitoba’s PED cases to 15 since the virus was discovered in the province in 2014.

Losses are not known.

“With the feeder operations, what you tend to do is you get some sick pigs and you get some that don’t make it, but a chunk of them will get through it,” Dickson said.

The larger danger, he noted, was to young animals. The virus is known to cause up to 100 per cent mortality in suckling pigs.

Neighbours asked to monitor

Facilities that have been in contact or lie within five kilometres of infected farms have been asked to monitor for the disease. Testing is ongoing and the provincial Emergency Operations Centre has been active since initial reports of the outbreak. Infected locations have been revealed to veterinarians with clients in the five-kilometre bubble.

Sows in infected locations are being exposed to the virus to bolster immunity in the next generation, the pork council has said. All infected locations are under biocontainment and farm traffic is being strictly controlled.

The Manitoba Pork Council has released expanded biosecurity measures in reaction to the outbreak. Farms in the warning area are encouraged to limit traffic and erect signs or barriers to enforce the rule, wear approved footwear, restrict parking to driveways and roads off site, lime driveways and avoid vehicle contact with dead animals or garbage, which should have a designated pickup zone at the end of the driveway.

“We know there’s been good uptake on the biosecurity because we’ve got relatively few incidents of this disease compared to what we have in the United States or Ontario,” Dickson said.

Ontario broke 100 PED cases this spring while over 3,000 sites in the United States have tested positive for the virus between June 5, 2014 and April 27, 2017, according the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Manitoba Pork Council has stressed caution when visiting assembly yards and processing plants, which might house the virus, or when transporting animals to or from the United States.

“It’s really important that the trailers coming back be properly washed and disinfected in wash stations in Manitoba, even though they might have gone to a wash station in the United States,” Dickson said.

Language grew stronger after the most recent confirmed case.

“All producers within the area are strongly encouraged to ensure full compliance of their existing biosecurity protocols — every person, every time — and to contact their herd veterinarian about how to further enhance their protocols. Special focus should be devoted to personnel entry into the barn and load-out area biosecurity,” the pork council advised in its latest PED update.

Since information shared with the province is normally confidential, producers are also encouraged to sign waivers allowing veterinarians to share medical information with each other.

“It’s important that all the veterinarians in the province know what this disease is because you get a barn in southeast Manitoba supplying baby pigs to a barn in western Manitoba. The vets need to know what’s going on,” Dickson said.

All 15 locations where PED has been confirmed in Manitoba have submitted waivers, Dickson said.

The looming cleanup

Barns now face the prospect of disinfecting facilities once symptoms have abated.

“With the feeder barns, they’re going to have to move the animals out,” Dickson said. “They’ll probably have to be moved to the United States, but they have to wait until there’s no symptoms of the disease. For the sow barns, which produce the weanlings, you can’t ship the weanlings to the United States without a health certificate and that means that the animals have to be clear of the disease for 60 days, so that’s going to hinder their plans.”

The post Pork industry nervous as newest PED cases confirmed appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Improving rural infrastructure was clearly a top priority to the province’s producers following a discussion over resolutions at the KAP general council meeting held in Brandon.

“I know that there are roads throughout every district that people feel need to be addressed. My concern is with regards to public safety and damage to vehicles,” said Bill Campbell, District 1 representative. “The condition of these roads is an accident waiting to happen. There have been some signs put up to help identify bad areas, but my belief is that there is not enough orange paint in the hardware stores to identify all of these dangerous spots in southwestern Manitoba.”

Along with seeking infrastructure improvements, the group passed six other resolutions that the executive board will take forward.

KAP will be lobbying for weed control in areas following road construction, ensuring farm visitors follow biosecurity protocols, garnering support for the development and growth of the inland aquaculture industry and urging both the federal and provincial governments to establish a new Green Cover program to improve the sustainability of livestock producers.

“We are continuing to lobby for improvements across the board to keep farms profitable and sustainable, from better Hydro service to assisting farmers in the event they receive workplace safety inspections,” said KAP president, Dan Mazier.

KAP wants to work with Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers, and the Manitoba Corn Grower’s Association to research herbicide resistance within stacked-trait soybeans, corn and canola, to better inform KAP members about the potential effects of herbicide resistance in Manitoba.

Membership growth

Prior to passing resolutions, KAP’s executive board presented updates on membership, finances, and discussed ongoing industry issues.

District and commodity reports were presented with most reporting an average season despite a late frost, hail and dry conditions.

“I have been calling it a good, average year. We do have our problems, especially with the late-May frost,” said Mazier. “I personally had to reseed 50 per cent of my canola, but that seems to be a general theme throughout the province.”

KAP general manager, James Battershill reported membership has grown by 500.

“Our membership report tells a very positive story. At the end of June we had 3,243 members, 500 more than this time last year,” said Battershill. “I think that this is something that we should celebrate and something that speaks well for the organization as a whole.”

Over the past year KAP has doubled its efforts towards building membership, including the addition of staff member, Jacquie Nicholson, who has taken on the role of membership co-ordinator.

Resolution progress

The group reviewed resolutions from the April general council meeting, including the issues of temporary foreign workers, strengthening relationships with new and small producers, water retention research and ways to better the urban and rural connection.

KAP reports making headway in the area of fuel storage, boasting the recent announcement from both the federal and provincial governments on funds allocated to a related BMP.

“KAP successfully lobbied the province to add funding for an on-farm fuel storage BMP through the environmental farm program,” said Mazier. “A new fuel storage BMP has been announced with the application process beginning on July 13.”

The organization is also working with the minister of conservation to get a statement in writing regarding grandfathering single-walled fuel containers.

“We have been given their assurance that they will allow grandfathering but we are still waiting on a formal letter from the minister of conservation. They are expecting this BMP program to roll out over the next few years,” said Battershill.

Battershill also reiterated KAP’s ongoing support for producers facing expropriation issues surrounding Manitoba Hydro’s Bipole III.

“We are still going to keep working on this and are holding regular meetings with Manitoba Hydro, advocating for a conversation to happen,” said Battershill. “It is a challenging situation but certainly one that we are not letting die.”

Agriculture risk management task force

Former KAP president, Doug Chorney, was on hand to make a presentation regarding the province’s Agriculture Risk Management Task Force that will be actively holding public consultation meetings throughout the province over the next several weeks.

“We have experienced extreme weather events on an ongoing basis. It has been a very difficult time for producers in Manitoba and throughout Western Canada,” said Chorney. “The Ag Risk Task Force is mandated to promote new solutions and to look at where we have tools in place that maybe need to be changed.”

Chorney joins Derek Brewin, John DeVos, Frieda Krpan and Goldwyn Jones as members of the task force that is chaired by Bill Uruski.

The public consultations began in Melita on July 9 and are being facilitated in a workshop format.

“We need to have better solutions. We can’t sustain our industry without looking at a different approach. The experiences we are having with flooding and drought, year after year are just too much for people to endure individually,” said Chorney. “We all take steps on our farms to mitigate risk exposure but we can’t do it all ourselves and I think there is a good argument to be made for public policy to support farmers.”

The task force will be presenting its findings and recommendations to the minister in December.

Those unable to attend the public consultation can comment online. Online submissions will be accepted until September 30.

For further information on submissions and public consultation dates, visit the Manitoba Agriculture website.

The post Condition of rural roads a major concern at KAP meeting appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Avian influenza.

Long present in wild bird populations, the low-pathogen version of the virus has entered barns, remaining there until a series of mutations turned into something else — something deadly.

“We have been playing with fire,” said Earl Brown, a professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, who spent most of his career studying the relationship between birds and viruses.

He said high-density methods of poultry production have created an ideal environment for the influenza virus to change, mutate and adapt.

“If you uptake a lot of a virus and put it into an animal, and then you take the bit of virus that grows and you put it into a new animal, and you keep doing that over and over again… the virus becomes a killer,” he said.

“The same sort of thing happens in a poultry barn — you get a wild virus, you’ve got a lot of birds housed close together, so the virus doesn’t have to jump very far to the next bird. It’s not a natural situation, but it is a situation where you get the evolution of high virulence and so it’s always a bit of a powder keg.”

Not all die

All mammalian influenza viruses originate in birds, but not all birds infected with influenza die, or even get sick, he said. However, many will become carriers of the virus, spreading it as they migrate throughout North America.

“Wild bird populations, particularly waterfowl and migratory birds, have acted as a reservoir for avian influenza for a very long time, which means they’ve had the ability to develop immunity to avian influenza viruses and they’ve adapted,” said Dr. Megan Bergman, the province’s chief veterinarian.

Wild birds that don’t adapt will die, she added, but noted that number of deaths in wild birds is fairly low.

Domestic flocks of birds, whether it be ducks, chickens or turkeys, also have the ability to recover from low-pathogen forms of the virus in some circumstances, although turkeys tend to be most susceptible to the disease. However, even birds with the potential to recover are culled, primarily to prevent a low-pathogen form of the virus from mutating into a highly virulent, highly pathogenic one.

Potential survivors culled

The first outbreak of highly pathogenic bird flu in North America occurred in the 1920s and was unrelated to wild birds. It was caused by the unintended release of a European virus by a laboratory. But the first naturally occurring avian virus to make waves was a low-pathogen influenza in Manitoba in 1953.

“It wasn’t a full-blown high-path bird flu, but it was killing ducklings, which sort of got it on the map,” said Brown.

But by 1966, a highly virulent form of the disease made its debut appearance on an Ontario turkey farm, forcing turkey production into the barn and out of the field.

The year 1997 marked another milestone. It was the year H5N1, or Asian bird flu appeared on the scene. By 2005 the virus had made its way to North America, meaning that a highly pathogenic, highly virulent form of bird flu was now present in wild bird populations. An influenza so adapted to domestic poultry it was ready to kill as soon as it entered a barn.

“Up until the Asian situation, the wild bird viruses would move into a poultry barn, become highly pathogenic, you’d clean up, decontaminate and start again — that virus would be eliminated,” said Brown. “But what happened in Asia, was the virus became highly pathogenic… they were seeing it out killing wild birds and they found it in wild birds. So you had a virus that had gone from wild birds to poultry, killed poultry, had then gone back to wild birds and was able to hang around in wild birds, so that’s very unusual.”

Highly virulent

Today that H5N1 virus has given rise to the H5N8 virus, the same highly virulent strain that has infected many poultry barns in the United States, where more than 38 million birds have been culled at 170 barns.

Yet Canadian producers have only seen a slight impact as a result of the current outbreak, despite being traversed by the same migratory bird paths as the U.S. Two farms in Ontario where infected earlier this year, but so far the virus hasn’t spread significantly north of the border.

Some suggest this has to do with different husbandry practices, particularly the size of American poultry operations, which can see flocks as large as a million birds.

“Certainly, density is a huge player in this particular type of issue, because they have many more barns with much higher numbers of birds than we typically see here in Manitoba; that puts them at higher risk,” said Bergman. “And when barns are very close together and you have a high level of virus in circulation, it’s easier to transmit it.”

Density

Another factor is that several barns may be operated and managed by the same person or persons, creating opportunities to spread the disease through unwitting human intervention.

The chief vet added that having smaller barns, located farther apart and managed by different farmers greatly decreased the risk of disease spreading.

Steve Leech, national program director for Chicken Farmers of Canada, said that Canada’s stringent on-farm food safety programs could also be playing a role in keeping influenza out of Canadian barns.

“I can’t speak to all the differences between the U.S. and Canada, but certainly with the past outbreaks of avian influenza we’ve had we’ve increased our biosecurity and changed some of our biosecurity protocols, it’s been a focus of the Canadian industry,” Leech said. “So we have biosecurity requirements that are mandatory… that food safety program isn’t just a management tool for farmers, it’s enforced in all 10 provinces and 100 per cent of our farmers are certified on that program.”

Management

Others have suggested it’s the fact that Canada’s poultry sector is supply managed that has spared farmers the intense losses experienced south of the border where operations are often vertically integrated.

Currently, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is preparing a report on the outbreak, as are American counterparts. Leech hopes this will provide more answers to questions about how the disease is spreading and why U.S. producers have been so hard hit.

In the meantime, all poultry producers are being encouraged to remain focused on biosecurity. There has also been talk of breeding more resistant poultry breeds and incorporating more genetic diversity into commercial flocks.

But Brown said those measures might just be too late.

“The horse is out of the barn,” he said, adding that changes to husbandry practices might have been more effective prior to the introduction of Asian avian influenza.

“I’m a bit flabbergasted at the size of the holding in the United States, where they have multimillion birds on one farm. Even with multiple houses, that’s just such a huge number of susceptible animals. How do you change that?” he said. “There’s no easy answer, not now… for the longest time you could have said, well maybe we should just decrease your barn density, change math, but now when the virus in the wild birds is so nasty, it’s really, really tough.”

The post Wild birds have higher resistance to flu virus appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The province had issued a bulletin Oct. 1 indicating a nursery finisher barn had tested positive for the virus, but subsequent tests found no trace of porcine epidemic diarrhea at the farm.

“Really what it comes down to is that no test is ever perfect,” said chief veterinary officer Megan Bergman. “Unfortunately these things do happen.”

An initial sample taken from the farm was tested twice and returned positive results both times. However, further monitoring by both the province and a private veterinarian turned up no signs of PED, a disease that has caused producers across Canada to be on high alert for the last year.

The barn in question had not experienced high rates of mortality as was reported in the Manitoba Co-operator in the Oct. 9 issue and further observations showed no clinical signs of the disease in the herd, officials said. Earlier comments related to high mortality rates related to general effects of the disease on young pigs. Clinical signs of PED include diarrhea, fever, vomiting and piglet deaths.

Since PED monitoring in Manitoba began early this year 1,090 samples from 182 farms have been tested for the virus. Nearly 4,000 samples have also been submitted for testing from high-traffic sites in the province. Eight of those high-traffic sites have tested positive for the virus.

“It’s kind of unexplained as to how that first sample came in positive, we’re not exactly sure how that came about,” said Mark Fynn, an animal care specialist with the Manitoba Pork Council. “Whether there was some cross-contamination at some point not related to the farm, we don’t know. But there are no clinical signs on the farm and no samples from the pigs or from the environment have come up positive now.”

He added that further investigation has shown that the so-called fifth farm was also negative at the time the first sample tested positive.

“We’re doing some investigation and seeing what we can find out, see if we can identify the source of the positive, but at this point we don’t have an answer yet,” said Bergman.

However, four other farms in the province have been confirmed to have the PED virus — two sow barns and two finisher barns, all located in the southeast of the province.

The now-cleared fifth barn is also located in southeastern Manitoba, but outside of the five-km buffer zone around the two sow barns where PED was discovered last month, causing some to take a closer look at the results.

“Because this was outside of the five kilometres, it was another reason for us to go back and take a really close look,” said the chief vet.

The presence of PED can be easier to identify in sow barns, because newborn pigs are most susceptible to the disease. Some sow barns see piglet mortality rates in excess of 80 per cent.

However, adult swine show few clinical signs of the virus.

“Signs in a nursery finisher are pretty subtle,” said Fynn. “Usually you have the herd go through a bout of having some diarrhea for a couple of days and then the pigs are back to normal — they recover pretty well and you don’t see any increase in mortality or anything like that.”

But better to have a false positive than a false negative he said, adding he believes the protocols for detecting the disease in the province are working well.

Producers are reminded to stay vigilant when it comes to biosecurity protocols, but there is relief that the number of confirmed on-farm cases remains at four, not five.

“It’s back to business for this farm now,” Bergman said. “We’ve done some really extensive followup… and because we’re not seeing any clinical signs and there are no positive results we’re confident that the farm is negative.”

The post False positive means one less confirmed case of PEDv in province appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Owners Leslie and Rudy Reimer are happy to talk about what they’re doing. Fishing for answers on how to raise fish indoors is as much what this venture is about as it is producing fish.

The Reimers, who raise roaster chickens for farm gate sales, have retrofitted one of their barns with a 195-foot raceway, a production system for raising rainbow trout. They recently took delivery of 83,000 tiny fingerlings shipped from a hatchery in New Brunswick.

Their farm is now the site of the first model fish farm in Canada, and the result of a unique partnership struck between themselves, a federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) program and Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives (MAFRI).

Watersong Fish Farm will be both a commercial venture for the Reimers as well as a data collection site for figuring out best management practices for an intensive aquaculture operation in a Prairie environment.

“We were looking for diversification,” said Rudy Reimer. Their interest was piqued after meeting with representatives of a federally backed interprovincial partnership in 2008 proposing to establish a half-dozen model fish farms in Canada as a catalyst for more aquaculture ventures.

The $1.8-million venture will be cost shared by the federal government, the province, whose contributions include paying the salary of a full-time staff person to work with the Reimers, plus the Reimers’ own contribution towards operating costs and use of their barn.

Their job will be to manage all aspects of the operation and develop markets for the fish when they reach market weights of one and two pounds, say the Reimers.

They’re also essentially testing the feasibility of such a venture.

Need for a model farm springs from the fact so little is actually known and documented about indoor fish rearing, says Rudy. It’s been observed right across Canada that lenders won’t look sideways at anyone proposing such a venture.

Ongoing data collection will document everything from how fast fish grow in these environments to how much power, water is needed and what it actually costs to run a fish farm.

“Right now, where does anyone get the numbers?” he said. “That’s always been the problem with doing any kind of fish operation on a commercial scale. We need something like this to show it can be done.”

They expect to have their first fish for sale this spring, and will then have volumes to sell every couple of weeks. While they don’t have markets nailed down just yet, “we’re working on it,” he said.

They anticipate selling fish to many of their 1,200 chicken customers. They’re also in discussions with various wholesalers and distributors, and even the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation. These fish don’t fall under the corporation’s mandate, “but they’re interested,” he added.

Access to a continuous supply of fish raised in a quality-controlled environment should have appeal to buyers, particularly in food services, Rudy said. Food service providers can be reluctant to list fish on their menus because it’s frequently unavailable.

“Now they can get it all the time,” said Rudy. “Our goal is to have Watersong rainbow trout on just about every menu in Manitoba.”

Rainbow trout were selected for the project because of their uniformity of size and growth, he added. The fish raceway is so named because it resembles a liquid racetrack, with a starting gate at one end, where fingerlings go in and a finishing pen, or “purge tank” at the other. Their production rotation will require bringing in about 40,000 fingerlings every three months to replenish stocks.

The barn’s water source is a tapped aquifer 220 feet below ground. With a water requirement of 60 gallons per minute, they are believed to be the most efficient system in North America for water use.

They can’t show drop-in visitors around inside the fish barn due to biosecurity protocols, but as a model farm they will open to select tour groups, the Reimers said.

lorraine@fbcpublishing.com

———

“Weneedsomething likethistoshow itcanbedone.”

– RUDY REIMER

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Although the origins of the disease outbreak in Mexico have not at this time been traced back to pigs, the paranoia that has grown as it spreads human to human across the globe has been disastrous for the pork sector. At last count, 20 countries have stopped trading in pork, Egypt embarked on a mass cull of hogs and market prices have tanked – once again.

It’s a bad rap that has left producers justifiably upset and resentful.

The myth that the disease comes from swine has been damaging enough. But the reality that humans carrying this virus can make the hogs sick is an even bigger threat.

That was amply demonstrated over the weekend when it was disclosed that an Alberta carpenter who had recently travelled to Mexico infected a swine herd, even though he was working on the barn and did not come into direct contact with the pigs. It was not known as of press time how widespread the trade implications of this might become.

But it underscores a pressing need for a review of biosecurity protocols in light of some inescapable facts:

Manitoba raises a lot of hogs. Those pigs travel. So do people. And finally, the risk of zoonotic infections with pandemic potential is rising for a host of reasons, including all of the above.

Veterinary and medical health officials have rightly called for increased vigilance on the part of hog farmers and rural veterinarians. Although federal officials have said they won’t restrict the agricultural sector’s access to foreign workers at this time, those workers will be required to go through additional medical screening.

Dr. Chris Olsen, a researcher with the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison stressed in an interview last week that it is important for producers to heed the warnings.

In 2005, Olsen was involved with a study based in Canada that first identified the potential for swine to act as a vector for new strains of influenza based on human, swine and avian viruses.

Collaborative efforts between medical and veterinary researchers determined that an Ontario farm worker who developed flu-like symptoms shortly after the pigs in the barn where he worked had developed influenza suffered from the same H3N2 Influenza A.

It was well known that humans and swine can exchange flu viruses, but this was the first known case of illness caused by a human, classical swine and avian influenza reassortant. The fact that both avian and human flus can infect pigs makes them capable of being the vessel for influenzas to develop multi-species potential. The H1N1 making the rounds now also contains genetics from human, swine and avian influenza.

Olsen said researchers have been noticing increased evolutions in the dominant swine flu strains in North America since the late 1990s, after nearly 60 years of relative stability. However, he noted the increase could also be partly related to improvements in the tools used to monitor the viruses.

Before 1998, the swine flu in North America was almost solely related to H1N1 virus.

Manitoba has already had experience with these new influenza types. In early 2005, the virus was identified in Canadian hog and turkey barns for the first time. It spread rapidly – first surfacing in Manitoba, and moving to Alberta, British Columbia and arriving in Ontario in July.

Researchers also found the extent of crossover between humans and hogs was higher than expected. In one study of 74 swine farm owners, employees and their family, 23 per cent tested positive for H1N1 viruses.

Most hog barns in Manitoba already practise strict biosecurity. The shower-in, shower-out rules and keeping facilities off limits to outsiders are well known. But a shower and a change of clothes won’t address the problem of virus hitching a ride into a barn in a worker’s nasal passages, which is what appears to have happened in the Alberta case.

And the rules are only as good as their enforcement. According to the Manitoba Pork Council, at least one Manitoba producer courted disaster last week by allowing a television crew into his facility.

It’s a dilemma. The media has an important job to do. Meanwhile industry participants want their story to be told. Biosecurity enforcement is easily misinterpreted as secretive and unco-operative.

The industry could help to partially address this by supplying stock footage captured under sterile conditions to help reporters tell their story. Reporters can also be directed to the National Centre for Agriculture and Environment which allows visitors to view conventional and alternative hog production systems through windows.

The Manitoba hog industry will be lucky if a temporary price downturn is the only fallout from this flu outbreak. It needs to take steps now to prepare for the next one. laura@fbcpublishing.com

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Rather than working on it themselves, as they had done for the two previous five-year plans, they decided to “outsource” the task and struck an external steering committee to do the work.

That steering committee then involved a group of 40 people from all facets of the chicken industry to review its proposals.

That happened during the annual Poultry Industry Show at London, Ont., in late spring 2008. The feedback from those consultations prompted refinements, then a presentation to the board of directors of Chicken Farmers of Canada in June.

By August, that board was ready to adopt the plan and in October it laid out the action plan for the remainder of 2008 and for 2009.

That’s the first stage for implementing the five-year plan. There will be new action plans every year, “and there will be adjustments as we go along,” said general manager Mike Dungate. “For example, we made big adjustments when there was the first outbreak of avian influenza” in British Columbia in 2004.

One of the major changes in this five-year plan is expanding industry risk management. That used to be about food safety, Dungate said, but now the term covers a much broader spectrum of risks, including financial risks. Other aspects are national and provincial emergency response plans, biosecurity protocols, traceability extended to the feed level, premise identification, foreign animal disease surveillance and contingency supply protocols.

Another change is from “consumer preferences” to “consumer expectations” for quality and variety, animal care and the environment.

Some of the other main elements of the five-year plan are market development, system performance – that is, to “optimize the efficiency and competitiveness of the Canadian chicken industry” – and organizational capacity, meaning “a strong national organization… (able) to bring the chicken industry together to develop consensus approaches to industry issues.”

The agency has made its plan a public document.

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