By Bruce Cochrane
The national biosecurity specialist with Vetoquinol Canada says, in response to the trend toward reduced use of antibiotics, pork producers are stepping up their focus on cleaning and disinfecting facilities.
"Barn and Facilities Cleaning and Disinfection to Enhance Biosecurity" was among the topics discussed yesterday as part of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2015 in Saskatoon.
Dave Van Walleghem, the national biosecurity specialist with Vetoquinol Canada, says every pathogen poses a risk and producers and veterinarians are relying more and more on stepped up biosecurity and an increased focus on cleaning and disinfecting equipment to reduce the risk.
Dave Van Walleghem-Vetoquinol Canada:
I think that why we really see an increase on that is because of the decreased use of antibiotics.
Because we are using less amounts of antibiotics, we have to control the diseases one way or another and we're finding that, by breaking the disease cycle by doing a proper cleaning and disinfecting, we're finding a lot more benefits of that allowing animals to express more of their genetic potential instead of fighting off the disease.
Cleaning and disinfecting properly is a huge part of all of our biosecurity today and it's a huge economic benefit.
That's actually what I've been finding doing this for the past 15 years.
I've been finding a lot of people understanding the proper use of disinfecting and not seeing it as a cost factor and more as an investment because it is saving them money in the long run.
If you can spend a dollar at the front end and get 13 dollars in the back end, you're better off.
For example there's been a study done where that, for every dollar spent on proper cleaning and disinfecting, that's not just including the soaps and disinfectants but also the actual process itself, showed a 13 to 15 dollar payback with shipping animals in earlier time, less feed consumption and better healthier animals.
Van Walleghem says we know that antibiotics are going to be pulled back from us in the next little while so we want to make sure we can do proper cleaning so we can reduce the amount of antibiotics we need to use.
Source: Farmscape