WINNIPEG — What if the truck driver asks to enter the hog barn to use the toilet? Does the operation have a protocol for that?
That’s a question asked of Dr. Julia Keenliside at the Manitoba Swine Seminar.
“Everybody’s got to work out what your procedures are because that happens,” said Keenliside, an Edmonton based swine veterinary expert.
It’s one of many biosecurity dangers that can arise at the load-out, which is an under-appreciated source of disease risk.
“The load-out should be seen as a high risk event,” said Keenliside. “We forget about the load-out. We think about the front door.”
Some veterinarians think more disease enters barns through unwashed trucks and animals than operators realize. Keenliside suggested hog producers look at Dr. Blaine Tully’s 2020 column in The Western Producer to develop the right thinking about truck and loadout risks.
Although there isn’t sufficient research to be certain, there are reasons to believe disease-carrying dust, mud, manure and snow on the backs of trucks can be transferred into barns at the load-out. Farms should take it seriously, Tully wrote.
“That’s what’s interesting about the ‘grey’ literature,” said Keenliside about publications like farm magazines, conference proceedings, industry publications and other sources of non-peer-reviewed information. “We have some of the cutting-edge thinking.”
The Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network has compiled both a study and a tips sheet about load-out biosecurity. Most barn systems don’t follow all veterinarian recommendations, so “we’ve got room for improvement.”
Beyond improving basic biosafety protocols, producers can look to more fundamental improvements, such as barn design. Keenliside said Minnesota adopted a two-door system that created a load-in chute and a load-out chute.
“That way they never have to load pigs through a dirty chute, they never have to take deads out of the same chute they’re bringing in new stock, such as gilts,” said Keenliside.
“It’s a take-home example.”
In China, some farms are walled off from the outside world and pigs are brought in from the edge of the property.
“The trucker never even comes on the farm,” said Keenliside, while noting Canada’s winter conditions make many ideas from warmer places harder to implement.
Beyond facilities design, a key risk control is to stop people from going where they’re not supposed to go at the load-out. Barn workers should not go beyond the barn edge and truckers should not come in from the truck.
A simple device, like a metal bar high enough to let the pigs under but high enough to block people, can effectively stop unsafe human traffic in a low-tech way.
