Spring is properly here, and for many it is a time of year for a reset and a clean-up – what could be better than reviewing your targets from the new year and setting out how you want to push things forward?
From a veterinary point of view, the most obvious clean-up aim for spring/early summer would be a health upgrade of some sort, generally enacted by a partial or full depopulation.
The warming weather lends itself to getting buildings and storage areas cleaned out, washed and rested, ready for your new health status, giving the best possible chance of success and future stability for health.
Of course, a depop programme is hugely disruptive to your team, pig flow and finances, so it needs thorough planning and detailed action to get great results. This also means planning needs to be completed well ahead of time, so if you wanted to carry one out this year, you are too late!
Planning ahead by 12-18 months gives the best opportunity to iron out all those niggles and make sure everyone knows who is doing what, and when.
Spring MOT
You don’t have to complete a depop programme, though, to help the health or cleanliness of your herd. The warming weather also allows quicker drying of buildings and equipment, which in itself helps to break disease cycles.
Even allowing an extra day or two of drying before moving pigs into a building can really help with some of those persistent nasties, giving you a better result in subsequent groups of pigs. It also provides the opportunity to get to those extra-tricky areas such as high walls and ceilings, if they are usually out of scope for your standard C&D protocol.
Spring clean maintenance of kit is also imperative to getting the best from them, both for the pigs and their efficiency. Fans, inlets and louvres often gain extra weight through dust build-up, or they just stop working/moving.
This is the ideal time to get them cleaned or pulled apart for some well-deserved TLC ahead of the hard work during the hotter months of the summer, when failures or inefficiencies will take their toll on the pigs and your production.
An annual MOT of your buildings is just as important as for your vehicles and, arguably, will actually give you a larger payback on the investment.
External eyes
Following the Mothering Sunday and Easter rumours of activist campaigns, we should also realise that these groups do not need an excuse to put pressure on us all.
Use this opportunity to take a step back and look at your unit with some external eyes – how would it appear if you had ‘Joe Public’ walking around looking for the first time?
Would you be proud of what they could see, or wince and hope they didn’t go into that building?
What about the areas around your buildings – is that pile of scrap from five-plus years ago still building up into an unsightly mess, never mind harbouring your friendly local rodents? Let’s use this time to not just clean up the pig areas, but also the overall look of the farm.
The camera-wielding activist groups are always on the look-out for an opportunity to get onto a farm (legally or illegally) and get some new footage for their campaigns. If we are not proud of our farm buildings and the pigs in them, we are effectively handing them ammunition on a plate.
Next time you walk through your buildings and pigs, just imagine you had a camera with you and how it would or could look with a certain slant accompanied by a voiceover or music.
Although this is a sad way to look at things on farm, it is not necessarily such a bad approach to imagine that there are cameras around all the time while we are with the pigs.
How would it come across if the footage was made public? Can we defend what we do and how we do it? We should be proud of our jobs and the way we look after our pigs on behalf of the food-eating public, and that includes being able to explain our processes and interactions.
Any pig unit can be misrepresented into coming across in a non-ideal way by using the right angles and set-up, but let’s make it more difficult for them by making sure that the farm looks exactly the way it should.