Sow farm health upgrades can lower overall antibiotic costs and improve production

Are you searching for a way to clean up diseases and regain performance, while lowering overall use of antibiotics? It sounds like a tall order, but by starting at the sow level, farm owners and their veterinarians are seeing significant improvements in growth rates while increasing feed efficiency and lowering death loss.

“A sow farm health upgrade is essentially the elimination of a disease through a load-close-expose strategy,” says Dr. Andrew Bents, veterinarian with the Veterinary Medical Center, headquartered in Worthington, Minnesota. Bents recently helped a producer with a sow farm health upgrade, and the investment is paying off.

When he brought the idea to the producer, Bents estimated it would cost about $40,000 to install the medicators and to load/close the herd. He also estimated that mycoplasma was costing the producer about $5 per pig. With a 3,000-sow herd producing about 80,000 pigs, it was easy to do the math. Ultimately, the investment paid off in about three months, he says.

“We cut our mortality from 8 percent to about 4 percent in the wean-to-finish phase. And we cut drug costs by 25 percent,” Bents says. “As a result of controlling respiratory disease, we saw a half pound increase in our weaned pig weights by using an Elanco water medication,” he explains. The farm produced 27 pigs per sow last year, so a half pound on 80,000 pigs is an additional 40,000 lbs. of growth by controlling respiratory disease.

Performance Improvements

Dr. Bents measured performance for the year leading up to the program and compared it to the six months after the program began. He could see the improvements in lower death loss, higher growth rate, improved feed efficiency and reduced drug costs.

“I inoculated our first round of gilts on Halloween of 2016,” he continues. “We had our first negative tests at the sow farm in March of 2017, which is very fast. We continue to test our gilts for mycoplasma at both the isolation barn and the sow farm to make sure that they’re not going positive. And as of last week (tapping his knuckles on the table), we’re still negative.”

The Investment Pays Off

Dr. Mark Hammer, who has been involved in more than a dozen herd health upgrades for Elanco Animal Health, says, “For the elimination of mycoplasma, we estimate that it’s at least an improvement of $5 per pig in growth and feed efficiency. One producer with whom I worked in a multiplication herd said they had a 20 percent improvement in average daily gain and a 20 percent reduction for feed conversion.”

It’s been proven that mycoplasma interacts with PRRS and the two diseases exacerbate each other.

 “Eliminating mycoplasma is a good place to start, because we improve the respiratory health of the whole system by eliminating that bacteria,” Dr. Hammer says. “Even though you may get reinfected with PRRS, if you’ve taken care of the mycoplasma, you don’t see the dramatic clinical signs — it’s not as severe. If you have both diseases, one plus one equals three.”

Commit to the Process

A sow herd health upgrade is not something to go into half-heartedly: All stakeholders need to be committed to it. They need to understand the effort it takes.

“It’s really important to be thoughtful if you’re going to do a sow farm health upgrade,” says Dr. Bents. “It’s not going to be a cure-all — you still have to look at the herd on a disease-by-disease basis. However, if done correctly, it can be highly successful in improving returns, day in and day out, for the producer.”

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