Farmer Focus: Hoping to stave off disease with wheel wash
© Tim Scrivener One of the UK pig industry’s biggest challenges is protecting the health of our herds by keeping out disease.
For those of us farming in the outdoor sector rather than indoors, the risks can be even harder to control and the precautions more complex to implement.
In recent months, there has been a worrying increase in the number of swine dysentery cases quite close to home.
See also: Red Tractor warns pig producers to step up ASF biosecurity
About the author
While we have already been very conscious of the need to protect ourselves from disease, especially after counting the cost of the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome outbreak we suffered on farm last year, there is always scope to review and improve biosecurity.
As is the case with many outdoor units, our nomadic nature and open-air tenanted sites create a real headache for us when we try to control people, vehicles and equipment that, for one reason or another, share our space.
Ideally, a unit needs a perimeter fence, but this simply isn’t achievable on our sites, so protocol has to establish clean, dirty and intermediate areas.
A layout that doesn’t require any farm vehicles, or staff on foot, to cross the path of high-risk visitors such as feed and stock lorries, would be a good starting point – even when these visitors have disinfected on arrival from the dirty public highway.
Visiting vehicles should never go to the clean areas of the farm where livestock are housed. Instead, they must remain in what should be technically classed as an intermediate area.
Providing good disinfection facilities is a key part of making the protocol work, and I was lucky enough to see some of the latest weaponry available at the recent Pig and Poultry Fair.
None of these things comes cheap, but I’m excited to say that we will soon have solar-powered, frost-protected wheel-wash facilities standing sentry at the entrances to our units.
They have off-grid capabilities, including water supply via transportable 500-litre header tanks and medium-pressure electric pumps, which will deliver a consistent supply of mixed disinfectant to the spray nozzle.
No line of defence is infallible, but we owe it to our animals and staff to make the best possible effort when protecting against disease and commercial disaster.