Decreasing swine mortality still tends to be the largest opportunity for farmers to increase overall profitability, which is why it is important that we understand all the factors that play into herd health. Dr. Chris Rademacher and I address this issue in today’s episode and talk about methods that can increase disease preparedness and what is necessary to start your nursery pigs off properly.

What you will learn:

1. Current challenges with nursery pigs

2. Introducing new caretaker...

Piglet mortality continues to be an issue for the swine industry and is one of the worst sources of economic losses in production facilities. Several studies have tried to identify new ways to decrease mortality to save producers money. In this episode, I talk with Kelsey Hammers about her study feeding zinc to sows at different timepoints during gestation to see how it affects piglet mortality. Take a few minutes out of your day to hear the results!

Meet the guest: Kelsey Hammers is a Ph...

We all know the dangers of PRRSV, but how many strains are out there, and how many can you have at a given time? In this episode, I talk with Dr. Daniel Linhares and Dr. Giovani Trevisan about their work performing whole genome sequencing of PRRSV on multiple farms to get a deeper understanding of the current situation of PRRSV and to see how many strains a single farm has circulating at a given time.

Meet the guests: 

Dr. Daniel Linhares is the Roy Schultz Professor of Swine Population M...

Hi there - Every year there is some form of disease outbreak in swine herds across the US. Whether it is PRRSV, PEDV, or something else, we need to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to maintain a high health status on our farms. In this episode, I talk with Dr. Cesar Corzo about his work on his Swine Health Monitoring Program about ways we can minimize the spread of diseases to other farms, and how to more effectively keep our farms disease free.

What you will learn:

Covid caused a lot of issues in the swine industry that we were unprepared for especially in regard to meat packing plants shutting down for periods of time leaving farmers with no one to sell their pigs at market weight. Hopefully something like this will never happen again, but if it does it is important we are prepared and have a plan in place. In this episode I talked with Chloe Hagen about her study where she fed nutrient restricted diets to grow-finish pigs to measure how it affected time ...

Often being overshadowed by more “famous” swine diseases such as PRRSV and PEDV, Senecavirus A has been silently moving through swine herds since the late 80s. Not much is known about its epidemiology and detection has so far been mainly limited to vesicular fluid. Dr. Guilherme Preis shares his work on Senecavirus A with me in this episode and discussed his work at further understanding its epidemiology as well as different sampling techniques that can be used to monitor spread and viral sheddi...

With the summer getting closer, pig farmers will need to start worrying about the effects of heat stress on their pigs. It can have a large impact on the productivity of the animals, especially for sows in lactation, as maintaining a high feed intake is critical. In this episode, Dr. Greiner and Dr. Erin Holmes discuss different feeding and management strategies that can help alleviate some of that heat stress during the summer months.

What you'll learn:

1. What to do with our sows duri...