A centralised pig biosecurity database is helping pig farmers to reduce disease pressures and antimicrobial usage, according to the head of Teagasc’s Pig Development Department Edgar Garcia Manzanilla.

The pig researcher stated that the inputting of data collected during on-farm biosecurity reviews carried out under the HealthCheck Programme has been of critical importance to the efforts to improve biosecurity in piggeries.

Mazanilla stated that the database is also helping advisers in the pig sector to keep more in-tune with issues cropping up on pig farms, allowing them to keep management advice up to date.

“The difficulty there before was that you would have one farmer tell you ‘I am having this problem with sows’, another farmer would say the same and by the time 10 farmers have said it, which could take two months, you realise there is an issue.

“With the database, you know instantly and that is its value,” he told last week’s Irish Pig Health Society symposium.

Manzanilla urged pig farmers not to treat a biosecurity HealthCheck as a box-ticking exercise and to benchmark their herd’s performance against the rest of the sector.

He stated that his target for pig farmer knowledge transfer would be to have a vet or an adviser on-farm at least once per month, but also recognised the role that farm staff can have in suggesting improvements to farm management.

Solutions

“Go and do a biosecurity check, compare it with the national average, compare it with the 10% and discuss it with your staff, because they could be the ones to find the solutions and tell you ‘actually, we could change this or do this better’.

“And we are finding that the ones in the farms are the ones finding solutions, but if nobody asks them, they will not be of much use.”